Written in Reverse
by JMenace
Summary: Once the possibility of chakra migrating through time and space has been accepted, the soul is only a lunging step away. Two legendary lovers escape to the past in order to save themselves, each other, and maybe the world- if there's time. A story of transmigration, yandere tendencies, and far more spiritual incest than Naruto ever signed up for. (Time Travel) (Naru/fem!Sasu) (AU)
1. Chapter 1

I came alive at the sound of an alarm clock I had broken years ago, and found myself gasping for breath in a bed that I had outgrown around the same time. My untrained eyes flicked this way and that, taking in what details of my room the predawn light allowed. I eventually settled on the clock, reaching out with a too short arm to hit the snooze and grunting with a too high voice when it went silent.

It took me a few minutes to reel my sanity back in as I stared up at my ceiling and struggled to breath.

"That old bastard was the real deal," I said, tone full of childish wonder. I held my hands up, inspecting the places where callouses and scars should be, and found smooth skin instead.

I laughed. It started as a high-pitched giggle that suited my current frame all too well, and then it gave way to hysterical peals while I clutched my head and came to terms with my answer to the old sage's offer.

"Alright!" I cried, propelling myself from my bed and hitting the floor at a dead run. I dashed the moisture from my eyes, a wild grin on my face. "Time to save the world!"

_With my eyes, I can clearly see... Asura's chakra clinging tightly to you.  
><em>  
>A quick bit of hygiene and a glance at the calendar later, followed by a much more prolonged tour of the village, I found myself approaching the Academy gates. I nibbled at a sweet bun and waved to a passing sensei, who gave me a suspicious look before continuing on his way.<p>

Ah well. They'd come around.

"Been a while since I've pranked this place," I murmured to myself, walking down empty hallways on the way to what I vaguely remembered to be my class. "I'll have to fix that before I graduate."

Blind luck led me to the correct door a couple minutes later, and I slide it open before the excited fluttering in my chest could make me think twice.

The class turned to face me as one, and I stared right back at them, drinking in the sight of all the people that had graduated with me so long ago. People that were precious to me beyond words. People that I had let hurt, that I had let die.

Then I locked eyes with the person that I had let leave, and I found myself unable to move. God, I had almost forgotten what she looked like _before-_

_Unlike the previous predecessors, you've got this strange bit of foolishness to you... And that has given birth to this different possibility._

"Naruto," Iruka said, and I blinked, looking up at another person I had failed.

"Hey sensei," I greeted, mustering up a grin and grabbing another bit of food from the bag I'd bought. "Sweet roll?"

A few people snickered. Iruka was unamused. "You're late," he said flatly.

Ouch. "Sorry?"

He shook his head. "Just sit down, and don't make a mess."

I saluted with my sweet bun and then stuffed it in my mouth, surveying the room for empty seats. To my simultaneous horror and elation, there was only one open spot, and the girl sitting beside it was still staring at me. Challenging me to sit next to her, probably. My lips twitched.

Now that wouldn't do.

I leapt from the doorway to the row of desks three levels down, pivoting so as to avoid crushing Choji's bag of chips, and then hopped over Shikamaru's sleeping head to the table on the other side of the stairs. A graceful leapfrog over an indignant Kiba later, and I fell into my seat with a noisy thud. I ducked my head just in time to avoid Iruka's thrown eraser, and plopped my bag of goodies down on the table in front of my entirely unimpressed classmate- friend- lov-_ friend_.

She raised an eyebrow, midnight black eyes as piercing as they ever were. I put on my best Uzumaki grin and gestured at the bag.

"Breakfast, Sasuke?"

* * *

><p><em>Naruto, what do you want to do? After this battle is over, what would you seek? I want to hear what you think, honestly and sincerely.<em>

* * *

><p>Morning classes came and went, and soon enough it was time for lunch. Iruka called me down for a lecture on punctuality and the upcoming Genin Exams at the end of the week, which brought back so many fond memories I didn't even mind handing him his sweet bun when he finished chewing me out.<p>

"Don't worry, Iruka-sensei!" I boasted while he cautiously inspected the morsel. "I'll crush this test no problem!"

He smiled wryly and ruffled my hair. "I really do hope so."

A moment later I was dashing out to the Academy yard, eying the scattered groups of shinobi-to-be. Every familiar face tugged at me, urging me to run over and say hi, how are you, I'm so glad you're safe, I love you all so much holy shit. Alas, the girl absent from the yard called to me above all others.

Sakura caught sight of me as I ran over to her group of friends and cringed in preparation for my usual advances, only to blink in surprise as I breezed on past them. My first thought was the projectile grounds. From what I remembered, Sasuke was absolutely obsessed with perfecting all her fancy Uchiha kunai techniques while we were in the Academy.

No luck. I crossed my arms, considering the empty training ground.

"Another challenge, eh, Sasuke?" I mused. Well, no. She was probably just eating lunch somewhere else. Even so! That didn't make me any less up to the task of finding her.

I had gotten pretty good at that over the years.

I found her on the roof, looking up at the Hokage Mountain with a rice ball held loosely in her hand. I sat myself down beside her, and found myself put under her scrutiny once more. I smiled.

"Hey."

She blinked, looked away. "Hello."

"Hiding from your admirers again?"

She smirked, and I found myself drawn to the curve of her lips in spite of myself. "Not exactly."

"What's on your mind?" I asked, looking up at the Hokage Mountain as well- but no, I hadn't defiled it today.

"Hn."

Now didn't _that _bring back memories. I snorted, leaning back on my hands. "Whatever, bastard."

"Idiot."

We fell silent, Sasuke ignoring me like she ignored everyone back then. Well, I'd fix that soon enough, I vowed in between furtive glances at her lashes and lips and those damned beautiful eyes-

I exhaled slowly.

This... wasn't my Sasuke, I reminded myself. Not wholly. There were parts of her that made my teeth grind and my heart pound in equal measure that had been lost in the migration, and those parts of her were never coming back if I had anything to say about it.

The life that had shaped the girl that I swore never to forgive for beating me into the ground every time we sparred into the woman that I couldn't stop myself from loving wasn't worth the pain that it would cause her. Her, and everyone else that I cared about. So now I was going to have to put my money where my mouth was and fulfill my end of the bargain with the old sage. I was going to have to fix things, and change the love of my life in the process.

I chanced another glance at her out of the corner of my eye. She was beautiful, even now, but she was still a _child_. And no matter what I might like to fool myself into believing, I had _years_ on her. Years of memories and feelings that I couldn't just force on her now.

It wouldn't be fair. Not to either of us, in the end.

It hurt. God, it hurt so much to finally, _finally_ have her back, sitting right next to me, with no way to tell her. It hurt worse than the lightning she had punched through my chest the day she left, and then some.

All of the sudden, I found myself snapped from my internal conflict by my own rumbling stomach. Seems my late breakfast hadn't been enough. Should have stopped by that beef stall after all.

"Here."

I blinked, looking down at the untouched rice ball the subject of my struggle had shoved under my nose. Huh.

"You sure?" I asked. She nodded, and my eyes squinted with the force of my grin. "Thanks!"

She shrugged, going back to ignoring me in the next moment. Still, the silence that sat between us while I munched on her lunch and she contemplated the mountains wasn't as tense as it could have been. And for now, that was enough.

She wasn't the woman I loved anymore, and it terrified me to think that she never would be again. But at the end of the day, I had made a choice, not just for her, but for everyone that had been hurt by my mistakes. I was going to fix this mess before it could happen, no matter what, because I'd made a promise. To my friends, to the sage, and to myself.

And Uzumaki Naruto never went back on his word.

* * *

><p><em>I see... Is that your answer, then?<em>

* * *

><p>Why couldn't I just talk to him?<p>

I stared fixedly at the Hokage Mountain, a monument to a village that I would have gladly drowned in seas of pitch black fire up until very, very recently. I stared with eyes that could no longer truly see, relative to the otherworldly clarity that I had grown accustomed to over the years. I balanced myself on the roof with legs that had been stripped of their definition and, a traitorous part of me worried, their appeal.

Sitting a scant two feet from me, and munching on the lunch I had thrown together in a haze earlier that morning, was an obnoxious boy with wild eyes and a smile that tore the breath from my throat every time I saw it. Such as now. Why couldn't I just _talk _to him?

_Sasuke... What is it you want to do? What do you hope to gain through this fight?_

There was too much to lose. Too much to let ride on a careless insult between myself and the man that had taken up his solitary residence in my heart. Not when he knew so little about me now, knew so little about what comments meant to sting and what comments meant to _bite._

Then again, this was Naruto. I found myself smirking. Since when had he allowed a little negativity to keep him down?

"What's so funny?" He asked, and if there was one thing I hoped never changed about him, it was that little challenging glint in his eye when he said it. I've been provoked into a lot of stupid things by those eyes. Some more world threatening than others.

I didn't miss a beat. "Your grades," I said, familiar words rolling off my tongue. He bristled, thrusting a finger in my face.

"Watch it, bastard!" He snapped, jamming the rest of my rice ball into his mouth and swallowing it without chewing in his indignation. "Or I'll kick your ass! In front of all the instructors! On _exam day_."

I ignored his blustering, staring at the finger he had yet to remove from the tip of my nose. A memory burned into my mind by my past eyes rose to the forefront of my thoughts, despite my best efforts. A similar finger, pointed at a similar nose. A similar tongue, licking similar lips. Similarly hot breath ghosting across similarly tanned skin.

You're about to lose that finger... _idiot_.

And then the digit was gone as quick as it had come, and Naruto was looking away from me, coughing violently. Probably choking on the clump of rice that he'd tried to swallow whole. I rolled my eyes.

In a way, it was a sobering reminder. This wasn't my Naruto anymore, not wholly. The Naruto I knew made me want to beat his stupid, cocky face in while also jamming my tongue down his throat, but he had been lost to the migration. The Naruto that I remembered from the Academy mostly just made me want to beat him.

Getting back my Naruto would be difficult if I wanted to stay away from the actions that had caused so many problems the first time around. Impossible, some might say. The path he had walked as a result of my actions was something that I had no plans of replicating, which left me here, with this boy that still had no idea as to the difference between the kunai in his weapon pouch and the kunai in his pants.

I couldn't have my cake and eat it, too. We'd both be unsatisfied if I tried to pick things up here where we'd left them off there.

I cocked my head at the sound of a bell ringing somewhere in the Academy below us. That would be the end of lunch. I took one last look at the Hokage Mountain, and the hauntingly familiar visage of the Yondaime Hokage, and made my decision.

I was going to just talk to him.

"Naruto," I said. He paused in brushing off the bits of rice he'd gotten all over himself, giving me his full attention. My fingers twitched, aching to wrap themselves around his throat and shake him back and forth, aching to bunch themselves in his shirt and pull him close, aching to fist themselves in his hair and pull him closer still-

"Still hungry?" I asked, tone only somewhat strained. He pursed his lips, eyes going cloudy for a long beat.

"I could eat, yeah."

I stood up in a fluid motion, tilting my head towards the market district off in the distance. "Then hurry up."

"What? Hey! We've still got class!" Naruto called, but I was already leaping through the trees towards the afternoon food stalls. "Wait, why do I care we still have class?" He muttered to himself, taking off after me.

A strange sound danced its way up my throat and past my lips, light and breathy. Not a giggle, because Uchiha Sasuke did not _giggle_, but not quite laughter either. It had been a long, long time since I'd had anything to laugh about. Still...

It felt good.

* * *

><p><em>I want to hear what it is you honestly think.<em>

* * *

><p>I led him to a familiar street corner and, when he just so happened to catch sight of his favorite ramen shack and drag me inside, I relented with as much good humor as could be expected. We sat ourselves down in the middle two seats, and I pointedly ignored the middle-aged woman giving my teammate- lover- frien- <em>lover<em> a distasteful glare.

"Oi, Teuchi!" Naruto called. "Fire up the extra burners- It's time for me to catch up!"

Laughter drifted out from the back room. "What do you mean catch up? You were here last night!" A moment later an attractive young woman with chestnut brown hair and a bubbly smile emerged with a notepad and a pen. Naruto's face lit up as soon as he saw her.

"What can I do for you, Naruto-kun?" she asked.

"Two of my usual to start, and a small order of miso while I wait. And tell the old man not to skimp on the fishcakes this time!"

"I never skimp on the fishcakes, you punk!" said old man hollered from the back. The waitress giggled, scrawling down his order and turning expectantly to me.

"Medium shrimp," I said curtly. She nodded and made a quick note on her pad, disappearing into the back.

"Thanks Ayame!" Naruto called after her, a silly little grin on his face. My eyes narrowed.

I never liked Ayame.

My shrimp ramen and Naruto's miso arrived about the same time, and then around a quarter of the way through my bowl his first "usual" arrived. No matter how many times I saw it happen, I always found myself staring incredulously at the massive bowl with "Uzumaki" printed in blood red kanji around the base. Naruto, of course, tore into it with gusto.

"Ahh! Perfect!" He threw down his chopsticks into his second empty bowl triumphantly, and I shook my head, lifting my own bowl up to drink down the rest of the broth. When I set it back down, I found him eying me.

I cocked an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"Nothing- it's just, uh." He scratched the back of his neck, and suddenly I remembered how much I had missed that bashful gesture. "I thought you didn't like ramen."

"You didn't give me much of a choice," I pointed out, though it had been my own horribly deceitful plan from the start.

He winced. "Right, yeah. Sorry, that wasn't good of me, was it?" Before I could dismiss his concern, he did it for me, an idea lighting up his face. "I know! I'll take _you _out to lunch tomorrow, your choice!"

I folded my fingers in front of my face, hiding my smile. "Who says I want to eat with you two days in a row?"

Rather than take the bait, he jammed a thumb to his chest. "Uzumaki Naruto says!" I blinked, dazzled for just a moment by his exuberance, and then turned away.

"Hn."

He wasn't the man that I loved against every bit of my own will anymore, and it terrified me somewhere deep inside the empty little heart he'd forced his way into that he never would be again. But at the end of the day, I had made a choice. I'd come back to this village with all its painful memories, because I wanted to right the one wrong that I well and truly regretted.

And fuck space and time, I _was _going to have my cake and I was going to devour it, too. He wasn't the man I loved now, but god damn him, I would _make him_ the man I loved. One way or another.

An Uchiha's pride would accept nothing less.

* * *

><p><em>So that is your answer. I understand.<em>

* * *

><p>Creation began with a tree.<p>

Upon the precipice of creation, as the dusk of nothing ebbed and the dawn of everything flowed, a single seed was planted. From this seed grew life, chakra, and conscious existence in all of nature. From this seed grew a Tree.

The Tree's roots spanned endlessly, burrowing and drawing forth life with which it nourished itself, and by extension, creation. Life sprung from its roots beneath the surface of existence, and in doing so created an element for the Tree's roots to burrow into in the first place. _Earth. _

The Tree drew yet more life from its roots, and in doing so created the second element. _Water._ Its leaves basked above the surface of creation, drawing yet more energy in order to create life above, and in doing so created an element for the leaves to bask in. _Fire._ Its seeds drifted far, far away, spreading life to every corner of existence, and in doing so created an element for the seeds to drift upon. _Wind.  
><em>  
>Having set the stage of existence, the Tree was left with one final task. It spurred all of the life it had created into motion with one searing jolt, and in doing so created an element for the hearts of nature to beat upon. <em>Lightning.<br>_  
>Once created, life in all forms expanded from the Tree. Birds took flight in search of different nests, fruit and pollen of lesser trees drifted away in the grip of the elements, and above all, things moved away in search of room to exist. Without exception, life came from the Tree, and life went from the Tree.<p>

Until one day, a fool returned.

When the speck of life stepped back to its beginning, rather than forward to its end, the Tree did not know how to react. So it did not. The fool saw the Tree, and felt the connection between themselves and all of creation, but they did not know why. Helpless, the fool asked the Tree what the reason behind its existence was.

Now the Tree knew how to react, and to the fool it conveyed the path to their answer: A journey for experience.

A journey for answers that would begin and end with the fool's existence, and would branch off into different answers along the way. For only once the fool understood themselves could they understand the Tree. Sensing this, and lacking any alternative path, the speck of existence that had for the first time returned to its creation once again departed in search of themselves.

In the beginning, there was the Fool.


	2. Chapter 2

"You can't ignore me forever, you know," I said to the darkness beyond the bars. I sat a scant few feet away from them, water tainted by the negative feelings of myself and my prisoner sloshing around my waist. The sewer was the same I remembered it, as if the resolution Kurama and I had made to work together had never happened.

What had happened to the healthy white light that had punctuated our new friendship? Why wouldn't he talk to me?

I sighed, clenching my fists in my lap. I had prepared myself for the loss of my friends as I knew them. I had prepared myself for the loss of Sasuke. It had killed me to make that choice, to cast aside the bonds that had come to define me. But I'd done it, because I knew I could make their lives better, and I owed them that much at the very least.

But I had expected, for some reason, to have at least _one _companion on my migration. I looked searchingly into the cage that housed the Kyuubi, monster among monsters.

We had made a choice back then, in the midst of a fight that no one man or Bijuu could endure on their own. We had put faith in one another that had never been thought possible, let alone attempted. Our chakras, the very energies of our beings, had crashed into one another, memories, emotions, and strength bleeding into each other until there remained one shimmering pool of _life_ far beyond either of our separate capabilities.

We hadn't just become friends at that moment. We had become a single entity. A true jinchuriki.

How, then, was it possible that he had been _left behind?_

"Say something!" I shouted, because it was all I could do. "Talk to me, you stupid fox!"

Nothing. The seal might as well have been holding back air with how absolute the Bijuu's silence was.

I groaned, burying my face in my hands, ignoring the vile water that clung to my cheeks. "I think... I get it," I said, so reluctant to admit it that I barely heard it myself. "That old sage's son, Asura. He didn't choose both of us to be his descendents. Just me.

"That's why you didn't say anything when I made my choice. Because even though it should have been _ours_, it was _mine_."

I peered up through the gaps in my fingers, and spoke more strongly. "I'm sorry I made my decision without considering what it meant for our bond. I'm sorry I left you behind." My hands dropped. "I'm sorry, Kurama."

That was what did it.

The water covering the floor crashed into my chest, forced out of the cage by an incredible force, and a split second later the sewer shook with the force of the Bijuu's collision against the bars. I slid back with the current, finding my feet and looking up at my best friend, refusing to be daunted.

He was _furious_. His eyes, intimidating even in kind moments, had been smothered by crimson fury, not even a hint of his slitted pupils to be found in their depths. His clawed hands trembled against the unyielding bars, leaving no doubt to their intentions. His tails, the cause of the intense currents, lashed behind him, each on its own strong enough to part oceans and rend mountains.

**_YOU_**_**,**_ he snarled, actually snarled the word. **You have no right to that name, ****_human_****.**

I grit my teeth against his wrath, ignoring the way the water suddenly boiled and hissed and tore at my clothing and unprotected skin. If this was how it had to be, then I'd just have to form our bond anew, same as everyone else. I'd have to beat sense into his big furry head, same as last time.

And there was no better time to start than now.

"I have the only right!" I roared over the reverberations of his impact with the seal. Kurama had never once appreciated meekness, in all the centuries of memories that he had shared with me.

"Because of this seal!" I gripped my shirt, partially eaten away by the waters that Kurama's emotions had made so corrosive, and tore it off in one sharp motion. I slapped my stomach and it came alive with the black ink of my father's seal. "This seal puts your life in my hands, and my life in yours. This seal makes us the same. My name is yours, and your name is _mine_."

Never let it be said that Jiraiya's flair for the dramatic had not lived on in his apprentice.

**You are deranged, **Kurama said contemptuously, but it was too late for him. I had already accepted the pain of losing another friend, and resolved myself in earning a new one. I grinned cheekily up at him.

"Which means _you _are deranged."

**Enough! You will LEAVE. **He punctuated his final word by slamming all nine of his tails into the bars with such force that I was thrown off my feet. Back into the waking world.

I blinked, and shut my eyes a moment later, waiting for the nausea brought upon by the transition to pass. When the barrier between us had been broken down, Kurama and I had been able to move back and forth between reality and the housings of my soul at will, using my body as our medium. But now we were back to square one there, too.

"Ain't this a bitch," I muttered, rubbing my aching eyelids and chancing another look around the sunlit clearing.

And found myself surrounded by over a dozen stone statues of the big man himself.

"What the hell?"

"Uh, hey boss," my own voice spoke up behind me, and I turned to see one lone, sheepish clone made of flesh instead of stone. "Some stuff happened while you were out."

"I just told you guys to test out a few techniques!" I said, incredulous.

"I know, I know! But the Naruto testing out sage mode managed to gather some nature chakra before he fucked up, and none of our other techniques were working, so we figured we'd all give it a shot, too."

Figured. What a bunch of idiots.

"So since you're still around, you pulled it off?" I asked, hardly allowing myself to hope. My last remaining clone shook his head.

"I figured you'd want someone around to explain, so you didn't try it yourself." He eyed the statues, an unsettled expression on his whiskered face. "We didn't get any feedback from the others turning to stone. I... don't think they're dead."

That raised a few questions. Questions that I wasted no time shoving into the furthest corner of my mind.

I had hoped that _something _would work, of all the various techniques I'd learned in my years as a shinobi. I still knew how to do them all, what made the Rasengan tick and the exact way to coax the world's chakra into my coils. But from what I'd seen and heard so far, that wasn't enough.

Yin and Yang. The energies of the mind and the body, the heart and the soul. Iruka-sensei's lectures on the balance between them had never made as much sense to me as they did right now.

My mind was willing, but my body wasn't ready. I knew what to do, but my body had yet to do it.

"Looks like I've got some training ahead of me," I said to myself, and he responded with a wild grin.

"Time to get wild?" he asked. I nodded, and formed the seal for the one technique that had not deserted me.

"Oh yeah."

* * *

><p>I sat amidst a perfect storm of Uzumaki Naruto, glaring at a balloon that refused to to pop while dozens of me talked a lot about a little, and suddenly wondered if transmigration had been the right choice.<p>

When it came down to it, there wasn't much I could do with Kakashi-sensei's shadow clone trick as I was now. At this point in my life I had barely known what chakra control was, let alone had any grasp on it. It narrowed my possibilities down from the Rasengan and its many variations to the exercises Kakashi-sensei had given me long ago.

So I had clones running up trees, balancing leaves on their noses, and smashing their chakra together in the hopes of producing some scant edges of wind.

Back to the basics, I told them. Back to the very, very basics.

Off to my right, a clone made it halfway up a tree and then, in his excitement, shoved too much chakra into his next step and blasted himself into the ground. He died in a burst of smoke, and I felt my eyes cross as yet another set of memories forced themselves into my head.

I was making good progress for only a few hours of work, definitely more than the first time around I had learned these things, which I guess made sense. My memories had to be worth something. Unfortunately, the longer we trained, the more we learned, and the more we learned, the more I had to acclimate when one of my clones killed themselves.

I was good at making clones. The best, maybe. But I didn't make them to last. A hundred memories of a few seconds of a fight I could handle- it all blended together, and made it easy to discard most of it. But a hundred memories of a hundred different training regimens, techniques, and results? Discarding those would defeat the purpose of training with the dumb bastards in the first place, and taking them all in left me with one hell of a headache.

I tossed my balloon aside in favor of rubbing my temples, nodding in assent when a clone grabbed it out of the air and looked to me for permission to work on it instead of his leaf.

At this rate, it looked like I wouldn't be getting the old man's hat anytime soon.

"What time is it?" I asked, unwilling to look up at the sun for the sake of my throbbing head. A clone somewhere in front of me answered.

"Little after noon, boss."

My fingers froze.

"Shit! I'm late for lunch!"

* * *

><p>The Genin Exams came and went, and I passed them with about as much difficulty as the first time around. Iruka, a man I vaguely remembered as being one of Naruto's earliest friends, had heaped all sorts of praise on me while handing over my headband. I hadn't paid all that much attention to him.<p>

I had been more concerned with watching the next student in line.

Naruto never told me the circumstances behind his failing the Genin Exam and then becoming a shinobi anyway, something that fairly infuriated me as I watched him dart from the examination room with a naked forehead. He'd fled from the Academy and his jeering classmates, and I had watched him go, tying my own headband around my neck and swallowing down the sour taste in my mouth.

I had no idea what it was he had to do, so for now, all I could do was wait and hope for the best.

Thankfully, he'd pulled through, and the next day I had found him smiling away in the seat beside mine, the same as I remembered. The teams had, likewise, been the same, something that left me with intensely mixed feelings.

I stood now in the Naka Shrine, looking down at the Sage of Six Paths' tablet but not really seeing it, for a couple reasons. One was that my eyes were once again not strong enough to decipher all of its text. The other was the third member of my team, who I would once again be forced to spend months of my life with.

I did not like Haruno Sakura when we were classmates. I did not like Haruno Sakura when we were teammates.

I _hated _Haruno Sakura after I left Konoha, and she hated me just the same.

Our relationship had always been strained. She had admired me in our early days as genin, and tried at every opportunity to be my friend. When I ignored her advances, she'd turn her attention to our other teammate, and delighted in rubbing my superiority in his face. At the time I hadn't cared much about either of them. In retrospection, it had made me hate her even more.

As Naruto and I had grown more and more interested in each other as rivals- though neither of us had been willing to admit it at the time- Sakura had been relegated to a third wheel. It was around this time that her admiration had turned to resentment, having believed for some reason that I would favor her over Naruto in _solidarity_.

My desertion only cemented this. It hadn't registered to me as being something worth thinking about at the time, for many reasons, and I'd happily have kept it that way.

But then after years apart, entirely against our collective wills, Naruto and I began to gravitate towards each other once again. Our rivalry roared back to life, and slowly, something else grew between us. Something I had never experienced before. Something I had never known that I desired up until I heard the way that blond moron's voice had changed, saw the way he'd grown, and felt the weight of his own desires in the looks he'd give me between blows.

And then Haruno _fucking _Sakura decided to stick her nose where no one wanted her, as usual.

I turned away from my clan's ancient tablet, a single tomoe spinning in each of my blood red eyes. Of all the skills I had acquired in my life, all that I had retained after my transmigration was a handful of low-level techniques and the very first stage of my kekkai genkai; and the latter only because I had already possessed it at this point in my life. I just hadn't known it.

I stalked out of the shrine, dismissing my sharingan as well as my thoughts on useless pink women. Tomorrow would be Kakashi's bell test, and for all that I could have crushed him with little effort before my migration, I was a very different shinobi now. I was going to need a hell of a strategy if I wanted to get a bell tomorrow.

Not that we wouldn't pass if I didn't, given that I knew the silly lesson he was trying to teach.

... But I still wanted to.

I walked through the Uchiha District, memories and emotions whirling around my head. I had learned many things about my clan and its massacre after I left Konoha, almost all of them conflicting with what I had previously thought to be fact.

At this point, I was confident I knew the truth, but I didn't want to confront it just yet. For now, I would focus on things that didn't hurt quite as much.

I found myself at my clan's armory, one of the only facets of the district that I had bothered to maintain after the massacre. I stepped inside, gazing around at the weapons, armor, and materials within. I would have to choose carefully. I was at my best when I supplemented my kenjutsu with ninjutsu, which my current level of elemental control would not allow. It was going to be a difficult fight, no matter how I looked at it.

However, if I could get Naruto to play along, with the right plan... We had a chance. A slim one, maybe. But I hadn't been given my flee-on-sight ranking for nothing, and with the right direction Naruto had the potential to become just as powerful. I had seen him realize that potential, after all.

I had been rather _intimately _close to him every step of the way.

My lips curled. "We'll just need need to get creative."

* * *

><p><em>Ibu Kanko, Elite Jonin of Iwagakure, crouched in the shadow of a mountain with his hands held in the final seal for his signature reconnaissance technique, and waited for death.<em>

_"Senpai," whispered Rookie Jonin Iseya with a level of urgency that would have seemed out of place for a squad of Iwa's best and brightest, had it been any other situation. "They're coming this way. Should we-?"_

_"Quiet!" Kanko's second-in-command hissed, cuffing the smaller shinobi over the head. "We leave when Commander gives the order, and no sooner. Don't disrupt his concentration." Murmurs of agreement rippled through the rest of their squadron, and faced with such overwhelming opposition, the rookie did no more than glance uneasily to the sky._

_A moment later an arc of shrieking blue light tore through the air above them, and the Iwa team collectively held their breath as an impact hundreds of feet up the mountain shook the ground beneath their feet._

_They had been returning home, following a successful mission, and had tripped over their own feet right into the metaphorical frying pan. Now, the only thing keeping them from beating a hasty retreat was the risk of tripping again, this time into the metaphorical fire._

_The two monsters clashing above them were not to be underestimated. This much, Kanko's squad knew well._

_Konoha's Toad Sage, a shinobi of unprecedented strength, was said to perceive his surroundings by means of his surroundings, utilizing the perception of the world around him to achieve a near sensor-like ability of skill in tracking his enemies. The briefing had not made much sense to Kanko at the time- all he had gathered was that, for a short time, his favorite camouflage technique would hold against the all-seeing juggernaut._

_His opponent, Konoha's last Uchiha, and their greatest defector to date, was a woman that could and had frequently dismantled scores of Iwa squads simply for being at what she considered to be the wrong place at the wrong time. Where the Toad Sage relied on the world to be his eyes, the Uchiha's coveted bloodline allowed her eyes to be her world. Genjutsu, stealth, and deception of any sort were stripped bare by her fully matured sharingan- whatever she saw, she saw truly._

_Kanko's technique would not hold up beneath her scrutiny for any amount of time, which left him with little to do but hope the Toad Sage could maintain her full attention long enough for his squad to find an opening._

_"Damn it!" A harsh voice roared above them. "I don't have time for you today! Leave me alone, Sasuke!"_

_An odd sound, like a hundred blades being sharpened on a hundred spinning stones, revved into life above them. Several members of their squad, including Kanko, shuddered reflexively. As if it wasn't bad enough that the Toad Sage held mastery over a bizarre and powerful form of alternative chakra, he had chosen the creation of Iwa's most hated shinobi as his signature attack._

_The tell-tale sounds of the Yondaime Hokage's rasengan grated upon the Iwa shinobi, and a moment later were joined by the sound of thousands upon thousands of chirping birds._

_"Not a chance!" The Uchiha taunted, her voice guttural with tension. "You're mine, Naruto!"_

_"Duck!" Kanko snapped, speaking for the first time since the start of his technique, and his shinobi instantly complied. Kanko clenched his eyes shut, and braced himself for the backlash._

_A moment later the two legendary shinobi met above them, and a shockwave of chakra slammed into Kanko's technique, driving him forward from his crouch to his knees. A moment later, the muffled boom of the two techniques clashing shook the mountain above them, raining shards of rock upon the Iwa shinobi._

_Then the rasengan detonated, and searing light tore through the darkness of Kanko's closed eyes, rendering him temporarily blind. Around him, he heard a handful of pained gasps as less prepared shinobi were hit with the full force of rasengan's final phase of attack._

_Far too few had known back when the Yellow Flash had reigned, but you did not actually need to be **hit **by the rasengan to be crippled by it. It struck in phases, each with a greater range than the one before it._

_Kanko looked up at the suddenly ravaged mountain, blinking away spots of light. It was a truly monstrous attack, for a truly monstrous shinobi._

_His vision cleared fully a few precious seconds later, and Kanko dispelled his technique with a sharp hand motion._

_"Now!" He grabbed the rookie, Iseya, who was still blinded, and blurred towards the border in a shunshin. The rest of his squad quickly followed suit._

_Almost before he'd taken his first step, he felt the Toad Sage's notice fall upon him. Kanko **felt **the way the ground beneath his feet thrummed with the sage's influence, the way the area's sparse vegetation reported back to its master the sweat on his skin as he brushed past it. The very air he breathed felt inexplicably as if it were betraying him, whispering to the Toad Sage of his squad's panicked gasps._

_No one had told him the sage controlled the **wind**, too._

_"Wait!" The Toad Sage shouted, and Kanko felt the world shift around him ever so slightly as the Konoha shinobi drew from its energy. "You can't blow my cover yet! **Kage bunshin no jutsu!**"_

_"Senpai!" Iseya cried, horror in the young shinobi's eyes as he watched the Toad Sage's clones blot out the sun._

_"Don't stop!" Kanko commanded, dragging Iseya along on another shunshin. "Die running, or don't die at all! **MOVE!**"_

* * *

><p><em>"Gaaah!" Naruto cried, gripping his hair and throwing his head back in frustration when the Iwa team disappeared into the range of mountains leading to Iwa. "You always do this!"<em>

_"I do," Sasuke agreed, leaning against a gouge she had carved in the mountain sometime earlier in their fight._

_"I can never just have a nice, uneventful mission outside the Land of Fire where everything goes right and you mind your own business!" He kicked a rock with all his strength, sending it sailing off into the horizon._

_She nodded along. "You can't."_

_"You won't even let me kiss you afterwards, half the time!"_

_Her blood red eyes shone with devious amusement. "I won't."_

_Konoha's second Toad Sage gave the mountain one last petulant kick, and then turned to lean back against it with a grunt. He closed his eyes, seemingly done with fighting, but Sasuke noticed with intense satisfaction the way the muscles shifting beneath his clothing tensed and relaxed sporadically, rendering him capable of moving in any direction at a moment's notice._

_It was, in Sasuke's entirely unbiased eyes, an invitation for her to come at him whenever she desired._

_It had taken a while, but her idiot lover was becoming a worthy rival._

_"I spent so long planning for this," he said, drawing her attention from his musculature to the deepening tenor of his voice. "I had clones on every major border, decoy toads on the roads to Kumo **and **Kiri, and I even left all my ramen at home this time. Plus all the stuff I did for the mission!"_

_Sasuke smirked down at him, and she relished his vibrant blue glare. "Did you really think that would be enough to distract me?"_

_It had pleased her to see that he was getting more creative in his methods of avoiding her while on Konoha business, almost as much as it had pleased her to cut down every single one of his obstacles._

_"Think's a strong word," he admitted. He hadn't hoped for much more than time to begin his mission, but it seemed even that had been too much. Man, but granny Tsunade was going to **kill **him. "Damn it, there's no way I can stealth this anymore."_

_Sasuke tilted her head, causing her wild bangs to fall across her face. "Why would anyone send you on a stealth mission in the first place?"_

_"A great Hokage has to be the best shinobi in the village, in all aspects," Naruto said firmly. He had probably rehearsed that line, Sasuke mused._

_"What does that have to do with you?" she asked. He glared at her, and she flashed her teeth in a challenging smile._

_"This is serious," he said, and there was real fire in his eyes as he gestured in the vague direction of Iwa. "I don't know when I'll get another chance at this kind of mission! Granny Tsunade didn't even want to give me this one!"_

_Sasuke dropped down in front of Naruto from her elevated perch, and he braced himself for another brawl while she threw her arm across his chest, letting her hand come to rest over one shoulder as she leaned in over the other._

_It was a familiar position. One of her favorites._

_"Well then, Na-ru-**to**," she murmured lowly, punctuating each syllable of his name by stealing another inch of space between them. "It seems we'll have to get..." Her breath was hot against his skin, her face still pleasantly flushed from their fight. "**Creative.**"_

_Konoha's legendary Toad Sage swallowed hard._


	3. Chapter 3

From an outside perspective, it was probably hilarious to see how much I hated standing still.

It's part of being a shinobi, after all, and I had based my entire life around the concept of _shinobi_. Ever since the Sandaime had explained to my brat of a five year-old self that you couldn't be a Hokage without first being a shinobi, it had established itself as the foundation upon which I laid the stones of my dreams. By the end of my life, Uzumaki Naruto and shinobi might as well have been the same thing- if there was anyone left in the world who could still think of one without the other, I didn't know them.

But gods help me, I _hated _standing still.

I could blame Kurama, if I really wanted to. Gaara and I hadn't been so different when it came to that- I'd had a better seal, but Shukaku had a hell of a lot less chakra than Kurama. Having an unconscious awareness of oceans upon oceans' worth of demonic chakra seething inside of you, held back by the tiniest slip of paper possible, would make anyone antsy after a while.

I could blame my mom, too. It had been her genes that passed the infamous Uzumaki vitality on to me, which couldn't have helped my temperament any more than it helped my chakra control. I could blame my whole clan for that, really. I could blame Kakashi-sensei, too, for showing up late to training every day and leaving me with nothing to do for hours on end. I could blame Jiraiya for not taking my apprenticeship seriously until the very last minute.

I could blame a lot of people. But that wouldn't make it any less my fault, and blaming other people for my own stupidity always made me queasy. The actual reason was pretty simple, anyway.

I was scared, so I ran away.

I'd never admit it to anyone besides myself and Kurama- and only him because I hadn't been given much of a choice when we'd crashed together into a single being- but Uzumaki Naruto existed in a perpetual state of terror. Not of the war, not of the demon locked in my gut, not even of the murderous woman who always seemed bent on killing me one minute and forcing herself onto me the next.

It would have been possible to conquer fears like that, at least. Maybe even exciting. That wasn't it, though. What I feared most, and what I feared always, was _rejection_.

It was something that had plagued me for as long as I could remember. First, with Konoha's people and their suffocating silence, driven by fear of a monster that the most powerful leader they'd ever known had only been able to _stall_. Then, years later, with my classmates, who I could never seem to strike the right tone with. I was always too annoying, too stupid, too _Naruto_ for them to prioritize me over the other people in their lives.

And worst of all, with my first true friend. The girl who meant the world to me. The girl who made me the angriest and the happiest in equal measure. The girl who I loved.

The girl who left.

So I ran away. I never stayed still for more than a moment, to the point that I thrashed and shook and fell off my bed a few times every night. I came to learn that if I kept moving, there wouldn't be time for me to think about my life. There wouldn't be time to dwell. Uzumaki Naruto didn't dwell.

How hilarious it must have been for everyone to see me run away from my problems while screaming to the heavens that I'd never back down. I had certainly laughed when I realized it.

I might have cried as well. It had been raining that day, so it was hard to tell.

In the end, it had taken a lot more than a firm hand or a soothing voice to settle me down for more than a few seconds. It had taken a whole bunch of S-rank assholes, a dead god, and enough pain to lock up every muscle in my body. Not exactly what Iruka-sensei had recommended during his lecture on meditation, but I've never been a great listener.

It had been at that moment, while everything fell apart around my immobile self, that it had reached out to me. A gentle touch upon my brow, where the leaf of my headband would have been had they not taken it from me. A soft understanding, blooming from the new mark on my forehead and enveloping all of the world.

I had heard it called different things by different people. A natural enlightenment, a spiritual awakening, a sudden worldly breakthrough. I called it an apology.

I had been running away so fast for so long, that it hadn't been able to catch up to me.

I called it an apology instead of an enlightenment or anything like that, because I didn't really _change _after I made my new connection and escaped my near certain death. Not how you'd think, anyway. I still hated standing still, and I still fell out of bed every night. But that was okay now. Now that this new presence had finally caught up to me, I didn't need to be still anymore. It could keep pace with me as long as we were moving in the same direction.

That's probably the one thing that changed about me that day, and for the better. I started moving for the right reasons.

And every now and again, I could settle down if I had to.

"Wake up, idiot."

Like now.

I blinked seemingly bleary eyes open, peering down from the tree I had perched in. I registered Sasuke glaring up at me with a cute little scowl, and then threw my head back in a yawn that belied my absolute awareness. I stretched, twisted my neck left and right, and after cracking my back finally gave my teammate my full attention.

I could meditate when I had to, and for once I actually did. The understanding that I had reached with the world was still there, I could still _feel it_, hovering patiently just outside my grasp. But whereas back then I'd had the strength for it, but not the mindset, I now had the mindset, but not the strength.

Body and soul. Yin and Yang. Something told me this new life of mine was going to be frustrating as hell.

"What do you want, bastard?" I grumbled, falling lightly from the tree and landing in a crouch in front of my teammate. "Kakashi-sensei isn't here yet, so I can sleep all I-"

"Here," she interrupted, tossing a roll of cloth at me. I caught it, eying it curiously. It was a little bigger than my head, and was heavier than it looked.

"You got me a present?" I asked, shocked. I wracked my memories for anything resembling "gift from Sasuke" and came up predictably blank. Back then, the closest thing to a gift that Sasuke had given me...

I shoved that particular experience back in the dusty corner of my head where it belonged. It didn't bear thinking about now.

Sasuke rolled her eyes. "You said you wanted to see something from my clan's armory."

"Oh yeah!" I cried, tearing into the cloth wrapping with a fervor. During one of the handful of lunches that I had managed to wrangle the distant Uchiha into, the topic of one-sided conversation had fallen to the Uchiha district and all the cool shit that was still hanging around there. Her description of her clan's armory had gotten me pretty pumped.

I'd been hesitant to bring up anything related to the massacre at first, but at the same time I was well aware that if Sasuke didn't come to terms with it soon, things would fall apart just like before. The introductions we'd done for Team 7 yesterday had only enforced that.

_I have a certain someone that I want to kill._

I unraveled the last of the cloth, and my negative thoughts fell away in an instant as I looked at the armor in my lap.

A pair of deep blue kote gleamed in the light of the rising sun, the uchiwa symbol emblazoned upon each one where the back of my hand would be. I turned one of the armored gauntlets over, inspecting the quality of the metal plates with a blank expression. My insides roiled with memories.

This... If every day was going to be like this, this second life was going to be harder than I thought.

"These aren't weapons," I finally decided, looking back up at Sasuke with what I hoped was convincing disgruntlement. Never mind the fact that these had in fact been my primary weapons against her damn sword while we were both abroad and constantly hunting for one another. _She_ didn't know that. Not anymore.

"They're close enough," Sasuke said dismissively. "And they're the only thing I trust you not to break before the end of the day."

I allowed myself to bristle and snap back at her, falling into a routine that was both incredibly familiar and incredibly _outdated_. There were things missing, things that made my teeth grind and my chest burn. Little expressions, shared looks, and above all, ease. Ease in arguing over anything and everything, no matter how sensitive the subject. Ease in talking one moment and fighting the next.

Ease in combing fingers through the other's wild hair, in clutching each other so tight that neither could breathe, in throwing the other down and engaging in an entirely different kind of _competition._

I growled. "Fine, fine! I'll wear the stupid gloves!" I yanked them on under Sasuke's smug, watchful gaze, unable to look her in the eye, or in the anywhere, really.

This was definitely going to be harder than I thought.

* * *

><p>The world had been swept up in a sea of vibrant orange, and it was all I could do to maintain my self-control.<p>

It was difficult to admit, even- _especially-_ to myself, but I had become spoiled in my past life. After deserting Konoha, I had grown accustomed to life free from distractions like allegiance, duty, and Haruno Sakura. My life had been one of continuous conflict, and it had spoiled me beyond repair.

In particular, there was one person that I'd sought out whenever possible to quench my thirst for a good fight. One person that never backed down from me, no matter how infamous I became. One person that I could always count on for a clash that made my blood pound and my heart sing. One person that I never allowed to escape my advances, no matter what situation he happened to be in at the time.

Perhaps spoiled was the wrong word. It was probably more accurate to say that my past life had made me _addicted _to Uzumaki Naruto.

I was crouched in the shade of a tree, single-tomoe sharingan spinning slowly as I surveyed the multitude of blond shinobi crashing against Hatake Kakashi like waves upon a cliff side. Every few seconds one of my fingers would twitch, and the muscles coiled tight in my legs would spasm, urging me forward. I was itching to reunite his gauntlets with my blade- desperate, even.

It seemed that all it had taken to set my instincts off was a look at my rival-to-be in action. Playing by the rules, fighting with Naruto rather than against him... This was going to be harder than I thought.

"Sasuke!" A familiar girl's voice whispered somewhere in the branches off to my right. I scowled.

"What do you want, Sakura?"

God, how I hated this girl.

Down below, a small team of Naruto's clones anchored Kakashi to the ground, allowing what my sharingan told me to be the original to dash in and grab the bells at his waist. I watched as the elite jonin's chakra spiked for a split second, reaching out across the training ground to latch onto one of the clones at the back of the crowd, switching the two in an expert body replacement.

The suddenly switched clone cried out in surprise, thrashing instinctively against the other clones holding him in place, but the original gave him no time to be confused. Naruto latched onto the front of his clone's jacket, which was at about the same height as the bells had been, and spun around with a shout. The original heaved his clone through the air at Kakashi, and the rest of the clones present hastened to follow after the projectile shinobi.

My lips twitched at the unorthodox redirection of his forces. Not bad, idiot.

"Well, I just thought since Kakashi-sensei only has two bells..." Sakura said in a hushed voice, creeping through the branches until she was crouched all too close to me. "Maybe we could work together to get a bell?"

My eyes narrowed. If I remembered correctly, Sakura had made the same offer in my past life, and I had ignored it in favor of finding a better place to hide.

"And Naruto?" I asked this time. She scoffed.

"That moron? He's trying to fight a jonin head on! He'd just hold us back, right?"

My fingers twitched again, for different reasons. If only this girl knew all the grief she had caused, the pain and self-doubt she had hammered into the fierce blue eyes of the only man I'd ever loved. If only I could _show _her. If only I could watch the horror dawn as she realized exactly what she had wrought, exactly what kind of enemy she had made in me-

"S-sasuke?" Sakura squeaked. "D-did I say something wrong? Your eyes..."

I blinked, suddenly aware of the frenzied spinning of the tomoe in my eyes, and cut the chakra from my bloodline. I had already spent too much chakra on it, and I was only surveying the fight. This past body of mine was woefully low on chakra. That would have to change, and soon.

I had always known that my years fighting abroad had done far more for me than the years spent training by myself in Konoha, but I hadn't realized the difference in results was this stark.

"He's holding his own so far," I finally said to Sakura. And it was true. He hadn't actually gotten close to either of the bells yet, but he had forced Kakashi to put his vile orange book away so he could deal with the sheer volume of solid clones in play.

"He is? But he still hasn't touched Kakashi-sensei..."

"Then help him," I snapped. I shot from the tree, simultaneously fed up with the pink-haired girl and unable to hold myself back from the fight any longer.

I tore my straight sword free from its place at my hip and spun, gathering momentum enough to drive my target into the earth when I fell upon him with my blade. The chokuto, which I had grabbed as an afterthought while looking for the gauntlets I had given to Naruto, punched through my target's chest like rice paper, skewering him to the dirt.

The Naruto clone gave a single wet gasp, and dispersed into chakra smoke. I blinked.

Wait.

I looked up as the real Naruto cursed, jumping back from Kakashi and glaring at me. "What the hell, bastard!?"

"Hn."Honest mistake.

I rushed forward, sword held loosely in my right hand as I weaved through clones towards the jonin with the bells. The weapon felt wrong in my grip without any lightning to pierce with, or divine black fire to scour with. Without anything to enhance it, Kakashi would be able to counter it with whatever he happened to have in his flak jacket today. I'd have to fix that particular gap in my skills as soon as I got a solid grip on my elemental manipulation again.

Resolved, I lunged forward, polished steel flashing in the midday sun. It was a sub par weapon for a sub par version of myself, but for now it would do. I swung, and its sharp edge cut true.

Another of Naruto's clones clutched its slit throat, crimson blood spraying through the gaps in its fingers. It dispersed before it hit the ground.

"_Sasuke!_"

... Damn it.

* * *

><p>"We passed, we passed!" Naruto cried, throwing his arms up in jubilation as he danced about the bridge connecting training ground seven to the rest of the district. "And we totally kicked ass, too!"<p>

Sakura shook her head at his antics, though she was smiling proudly all the same. Kakashi laughed lightly, reaching out to mess with his student's wild blond hair.

"Don't get too excited, now," the elite jonin said, smoothly dodging Naruto's attempt to swat his hand away and instead patting his shoulder. "We wouldn't want you to burn yourself out before the celebration, hm?"

Naruto, predictably, lit up at the mention of the lunch Kakashi had promised them for performing so well on the test.

"Right, food! Ah, what should we get, what should we get? There's ramen, barbecue, ramen _with _barbecue-"

"I don't like ramen," Sakura interjected. Naruto stumbled to a halt, the blood draining from his face. "I prefer sushi."

He shuddered, offering her a shaky grin. "Well, nobody's perfect, right?"

I snorted from my place in the back of the group, where I had been covertly basking in the glow of Naruto's excitement. Naruto's gaze fell upon me like a drowning man upon a raft. My heart beat just a bit faster.

"What do you think, Sasuke?" He asked desperately. I pretended to think about it for a moment.

"Sushi's fine."

I didn't really like sushi either, but his horrified expression was too good to pass up.

Kakashi smiled at Naruto's growing hysterics, nodding along in agreement. "Sushi it is!"

We made our way out of the training ground district and into the afternoon markets, alternating between scoping out stalls and making sure Naruto didn't run off to drown himself in cheap ramen. The streets were packed with civilians and shinobi alike, and I allowed myself to feel nostalgic as I took in the swinging paper lanterns strung up between buildings in preparation for one of the spring festivals. It had been a very long time since I had seen Konoha in such high spirits.

As much as I despised this place at times, it had still been my home at one point. Most of my happiest memories had involved this village, and if I managed to fix my past mistakes, the rest of them would, too.

Kakashi led us through the crowds, his bobbing gray hair a beacon amongst the waves of common colors. I forced my way through groups and couples of all sorts, making sure to keep my teammates in view in case either of them did something stupid. I watched with unveiled contempt as civilian upon shinobi upon civilian bumped into Naruto and then recoiled, expressions alarmed, uneasy, _afraid_.

Trash, all of them. What did he see in these people? What made him fight so fiercely to protect them? What made him stay? What made him choose them over me?

"Sorry! Sorry! My bad. Ah, careful with those! Sorry granny!" Naruto chanted, apologizing to every person that gave him an off look, smiling cheerfully all the way while I stewed in my indignation.

We arrived at a surprisingly high end sushi restaurant called Sushi Delight, and Kakashi quickly ushered us past the serious-faced attendant at the door. The attendant bowed deeply as we passed, and Kakashi inclined his head in turn.

"We'll be taking a booth today," Kakashi said, and the attendant nodded gravely.

"Of course, Hatake-san. I assume you'll be seating yourselves?"

Kakashi chuckled, pointing us towards an open table near the bar. "You know me too well, Okura-san."

We headed to the booth while he hung back to banter. Sakura slid into the left booth, giving me a tentative smile and patting the spot beside her. I looked to Naruto, who was eying the menus on the table with an anxiety I hadn't seen in him since that one time on top of the Hokage's desk.

I rolled my eyes and shoved him into the right booth, sliding in after him before he could respond.

"It's just fish," I said to his betrayed eyes.

"It wouldn't kill you to eat something healthy every once in a while," Sakura chimed in, hiding the small hurt that my rejection had inflicted. "You might even grow an inch!"

"So cruel, Sakura!"

"I'm just saying!"

"Alright then!" Kakashi said brightly, appearing seated beside Sakura in a body flicker. "I made sure to order a full platter, since Naruto said he was so hungry."

Naruto groaned in agony, and I smiled behind my bridged fingers.

Drinks arrived a few minutes later, and my mind began to wander while the rest of the team discussed the missions we'd be taking, the training Kakashi would be giving us, and so on. Kakashi was as tight-lipped about the whole thing as I remembered him being last time I asked, which meant our improved performance on his test hadn't changed his intentions to bury us in D-ranks at all.

My focus drifted, and, as had all too often happened since returning to this time frame, it drifted towards a very specific person. I stared down at my menu with hooded eyes, chin propped up by my linked fingers. Dark, ugly emotion writhed inside my chest, clawing and twisting my chakra into something obscene. My teeth clenched of their own accord.

This feeling... It had been plaguing me since my transmigration. Whenever my attention wasn't occupied with the timeline, or Naruto, or anything suitably pressing, it dug itself into me. Taunting me. Whispering to me. Testing me.

It had hit me all at once during our introductions to one another, when prompted for my dreams. My answer, even in the privacy of my own mind, hadn't been to fix my mistakes. It hadn't been to become a strong kunoichi. To my secret shame, it hadn't even been to protect the person I loved.

It had been the same as last time. To kill a certain someone.

_Uchiha Madara._

"Sasuke?" Sakura asked. I twitched, registering everyone's sudden concern for me.

"What?"

"We asked if you'd like to start doing missions tomorrow," she said meekly. I closed my eyes, taking a moment to master my emotions, and nodded once.

"Fine."

"What's up with you?" Naruto asked, nudging me. "You got pouty all of the sudden."

My eyes flickered off to the side, unwilling to look at him while the memories brought upon by that feeling were still so fresh. Instead, I alighted upon a passing waitress, reached out, and plucked the slimiest piece of sushi from the platter. She walked right on by, oblivious. I turned back to my table and found Kakashi raising an eyebrow at me. I smirked.

Without looking, I jammed three fingers into Naruto's stomach, and when he gasped I shoved what I assumed to be a piece of seaweed-wrapped salmon into his mouth.

The blond shinobi slammed his head back against the wall in his haste to pull away, but it was too late. A strangled noise of pain tickled my ears, and this time I did look at him, just to see the way his face contorted in disgust at the texture. Sakura giggled and Kakashi laughed in amusement while he clawed at the roll of napkins wrapped around his chopsticks, looking for something to spit the pricey fish into.

"_Sho shlimey!_"

I settled my chin back onto my bridged fingers, silently thanking him for clearing my mood. For the time being, at least. I had no doubt that as soon as we parted ways that feeling would return at full strength, and I'd spend the rest of my day stewing in the events leading up to my transmigration.

It would begin with Madara, and it would end with Madara. Everything she had done to me, everything she had done to Naruto. The happiness that she had torn down, the pain that she had caused.

And the one she had taken from me.

Our own waitress arrived with an enormous platter of raw fish, and I steered myself towards eating, listening, and most importantly not _thinking_. For at least this one meal, I would focus on the living, breathing boy beside me, and not the drained, silent, _lifeless_-

I shoved another piece of sushi in Naruto's mouth, and latched my focus desperately onto the hysterics that followed.

This was going to be much, much harder than I thought.


	4. Chapter 4

**"Come on!" I howled into the starlight, voice husky with pain and unwavering resolve.** "Show me what you're made of! Prove that you have what it takes to be Uzumaki Naruto, Toad Sage of Konoha, ninth wonder of the world!"

My clone was all too happy to comply, hurtling out of the trees and throwing the both of us into furious close combat. The forest became a blur of midnight colors around us as we pushed our untrained bodies to the limit, blurring in and out of jukes and ducks, our gauntlet-clad fists hovering protectively in front of our faces all the while. My clone lashed out at me again and again with jabs at my face and stomach, swaying along with the rhythm of our exchange.

He pushed me back, his criminally handsome face set in a rictus of determination. He struck at me with all the speed and ferocity of a chakra construct that didn't have to worry about overreaching and being killed for it. My clone was free to rail against me with every ounce of Uzumaki Naruto that I had packed into his yet stocky frame, because he knew that even if he lost there would be another to replace him.

And even so, he was not enough to overcome me.

"You are _not_ Uzumaki Naruto," I intoned, ducking his cross and darting inside his guard. Only then did I move my clenched fists from in front of my face, digging the left one into his unprotected gut and throwing the right one out to my side. I splayed my fingers wide, and vibrant blue chakra bloomed to life in the palm of my gauntlet.

_Rasengan!_

My father's pride and joy took my left hand's place in the clone's stomach, and he gasped in mixed surprise and pain as the initial impact of the jutsu hit him. I grit my teeth and focused everything on maintaining the miniature bijuudama clutched in my fingers.

A sharp whine of chakra whirling against chakra cut through the late night noises of Konoha's training ground forests as the rasengan came to the end of its first grinding phase and began the transition into its drilling phase. My clone finally dispersed, a ruptured stomach going well beyond its threshold for damage, and I allowed myself a moment of triumph.

Then the rasengan faltered and blew up in my face.

Several hours later, as the sun began to rise and shinobi began funneling into the training grounds district for morning practice and team meetings, I ran amongst the trees with a spring in my step and a bunch of disgustingly sweaty clothes stuck to my skin. It had been a good training session.

When I arrived at my destination, the small river that cut through several of the genin training grounds, including my own, I hurried to rectify my sorry state. Jacket, shirt, pants, and boxers were stripped away one at a time, forming a nasty pile in the hollow of a tree that I had designated as my laundry basket away from home. That done, I spent a few seconds basking in the early morning breeze, and then took a running dive into the river.

The cold water slapped my slight fatigue silly, banishing the aches and pains that my clones and botched attempts at the rasengan had inflicted on me. I shook my head beneath the water, vigorously scratching my scalp, and grinned delightedly as the chill dug deep into the roots of my hair.

I kicked off from the bottom of the river a minute or two later, having scrubbed myself as best as I could, and took off down the river. Fledgling sunlight danced along the surface of the water, broken only by my own strokes through it. It's become something of a routine for me, since my transmigration, to spend my nights literally beating myself into the ground in search of my lost skills. And afterwards, it's become a routine for me to take the river to team training in place of an actual shower at my apartment, because my apartment was a lot lonelier than I remembered it being. It's easier like this, anyway.

I kept track as I swam through training grounds twelve, eleven, ten, nine, and finally, eight. On cue, I spotted a girl in a heavy beige coat running through a set of kata, and waved.

"Morning, Hinata!" I called.

I hadn't ever noticed my first time around as a genin, but Hinata trained like crazy. By the time most genin teams met up in the morning I'd have already been long gone, but Hinata was always there when I passed by. She always seemed to be working on some Hyuuga technique or another, considering she always had her byakugan on, and from what I could tell she trained almost as long as I did before team meetings.

Why else would she be red in the face and stumbling in and out of her kata by the time I went by? She was clearly out there giving it her all long before I showed up. I could definitely respect a work ethic like that.

"G-good morning, Naruto!" She called back in a strained voice, no doubt from all the work she'd been doing.

I made it to my destination a few minutes later: A tree in training ground seven that I had dubbed my dresser away from home and stuffed with a towel and some spare clothes. I pulled myself out of the river and dried off, throwing on my orange pants, mesh shirt, and jumper. That done, and with nothing left to do until the rest of my team decided to show up, I scaled my dresser tree and laid myself out on the branch that I had dubbed my bed away from home.

I threw an arm over my face, closed my eyes, and to the untrained eye, fell asleep. In reality, I turned my focus away from the outside world and dove deep into the dazzling sea of light and warmth that was my chakra system. As time drifted by, I immersed myself deeper and deeper inside, and in doing so I brought myself paradoxically closer to the infinitely more dazzling chakra system of the world around me.

It was something that I had never done before my transmigration- purposefully resonating myself with nature without actually drawing upon its energies. It hadn't been necessary. When the time had come for me to call upon what the toads called sage mode way back when, my body, my yang, had already acclimated itself to the pulse of the world's chakras. By accident, mostly, but there you go.

Now, though, I had the mindset, the yin, but the experiences as a shinobi that had acclimated my yang were gone. Erased by the Rikudou Sennin. So when I could spare the time I forced myself to be still, and I did my best to coax this inexperienced body of mine into _understanding_.

I had no sense of progress, no sense of right or wrong in doing this. When all was said and done, Uzumaki Naruto was not a particularly intelligent man. I could be sharp, I could be clutch, but parsing the intricacies of the chakra system that wound through all of creation was an act of theoretical bullshitting I wouldn't even bother attempting. Instead, I remembered my past self, remembered the feel of the yang that I had lost, and I poked and prodded at what yang I had now and tried to make it feel the same.

In other words, I was attempting to trick my body, and thus nature, into thinking that I was already a sage. No, it didn't make sense to me either.

But if nothing else it was kind of relaxing, and it helped keep me focused. Both were good things, especially considering what today was. Today, of course, being the start of one of a handful of events that had been carved so deeply into my memory that years later I still remembered everything that was coming, all the way down to the way the bile would taste in my throat as I threw my teammates over my shoulders and fled from the battle that would ultimately claim Hatake Kakashi's life.

Today was the day Team 7 took our first C-rank mission. It was the beginning of the trip that had laid the foundation for my relationship with Sasuke. It was the beginning of my first and second introductions to my fellow jinchuriki. It was the beginning of the end for the sensei that I never got the chance to really know.

Or it had been, anyway. This time, Team 7 would make it back to Konoha as a complete team. This time, I resolved, it was going to be slightly different.

And by slightly, I meant completely.

* * *

><p>By the time Sasuke finally decided to show up, I'd already twisted my chakra coils into a state of being that was completely different from what they had been earlier that morning. She leaned against my dresser tree, and I didn't need to be a sage to feel the expectant look she leveled at me.<p>

I began the disorienting process of pulling myself free of the innermost workings of my chakra, navigating through grasping roots of tenketsu and star-like clusters of chakra surrounding my internal organs. I came back to the outside world with a sharp gasp of cool air and the taste of sap in my mouth, eyes flickering open and gradually adjusting to the mix of greens and browns that was so different from the shining spectrum of light pulsing away within me.

I shook myself free from my stupor and sat up, twisting left and right and earning myself a few satisfying pops in my back for the effort. Then I reached down and wrapped my fingers around the branch beneath me. I arched my back and yawned explosively for the benefit of my watching teammate, and through the hand holding the branch I urged my chakra to flow.

A funny little fluttering sensation flowed down my arm, like the feeling you get in your stomach during an unexpected free fall. I narrowed my eyes, adjusting the flow of my chakra to match the new layout of my coils, until a few seconds later I got the desired result and my hand stuck to the branch. Satisfied, I swung myself down to Sasuke.

There was a reason shinobi generally didn't go around restructuring the chakra coils that the Rikudou Sennin had so graciously bestowed upon them. Generally, in this case, really meaning never. It was sort of impossible if you didn't have a grasp of chakra on the level of a sensor, or, say, an Uzumaki. It didn't have any noticeable benefits most of the time- the only reason I was doing it was because I already knew good things would happen if I could force my chakra to flow a certain way. Finally, it was _dangerous_. Something that might look like the slightest of tweaks to the untrained eye might result in losing years upon years of hard won chakra control, never to be returned.

Good for me that my idiot thirteen year-old self didn't have any chakra control to lose, and even better that my intimate sense for chakra had not been lost in the transmigration.

"What are you thinking about?" Sasuke asked, and I blinked. A couple slaps to my cheeks later and I was firmly back in the land of the living.

Meditating wasn't too bad by itself, but it was a real pain in the ass pulling myself from my sagely musings afterwards.

"Forgot to go home last night," I said, sort of honestly. "Wondering if my plants are gonna be okay."

"Out pranking again, hm?" Her disdain encircled me like a warm embrace, and I couldn't help but take a moment to appreciate it. No matter how much it made my teeth grind, it was better than the last emotion I had seen on her beautiful, infuriating, _amazing_ face. Always better than the horror and the tears that had broken my heart into so many aching pieces.

Always.

"Not this time!" I declared, jabbing a thumb grandly at myself. "I was working on a kickass new jutsu all night."

"Were you?" She asked, glancing at me in mixed surprise and consideration. There was a glint in her expression, the first hint of an excitement that had been a constant presence in our later dealings with each other.

Even now, Sasuke loved a good fight.

"Um!" I nodded, and grinned cheekily at the way she tilted her head just so, inviting me to continue. "Hey, Sakura!"

Sasuke's eyes narrowed dangerously as I turned to greet our third teammate, but I didn't pay it too much attention. Things had always been, ah, tense between my teammates, even this far back. If all went well, though, there wouldn't be any reason for things to completely fall apart like they did the last time around. This much, at least, I was confident I could fix.

Sasuke and Sakura were going to be friends if it was the last god damn thing I did.

"Uh, morning," Sakura hesitantly returned my greeting. Since my return to my younger self, she always seemed to be caught off guard around me. She didn't know how to treat an Uzumaki Naruto that just wanted to be her friend, it seemed. Man, but I didn't have a single clue back then, did I?

"Say good morning, Sasuke," I hissed theatrically, nudging the girl beside me. Her expression somehow became even more poisonous at that, and she turned her head away from both of us with a huff that I only caught because I was listening for it.

Heh. She's too cute.

"So what do you guys think today will be? Training, D-ranks, and more training? Or D-ranks, training, and more D-ranks?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

All told, it's been a pretty dull second chance at life so far. It was to be expected, I guess. I've mostly been preparing myself for today, and doing my best to kick start the relationships that had brought me back here in the first place.

Something tells me things are going to be changing pretty soon, though.

"Tell me next time," Sasuke suddenly said, looking at me from the corner of her eye. "When you're going to be training by yourself. I'll join you."

Yeah, I could already tell how that would go. I didn't have a whole lot of power to hold back right now, almost nothing compared to the kind of crazy shit I was used to throwing around, but I still hadn't been giving it my all during team training. Mostly because I didn't trust myself not to hurt one of my teammates with my still faulty control. My solo training sessions were my only opportunity to claw my way back to competence, and I knew for a fact that Sasuke would react _less than well _to me suddenly whipping out the rasengan, no matter how incomplete my grasp over it now was in comparison to what it had been.

Still. It made me smile, because it was a sign that she was starting to care again. Even if the Sasuke I had known before had never stopped caring, not _really_, it had certainly felt like it at the time. And even if this new, old Sasuke only really cared about my secret kickass jutsu, at least she cared.

It looked like I was making some progress after all.

* * *

><p><strong>I wasn't making any progress at all.<strong>

It's been two weeks, four days, five hours, and approximately thirty-eight minutes since the last time I've held the man I love in my arms, and even longer since I've done so without having to worry about his impending death. If I had any sanity left to lose, it would surely be slipping through my fingers at this point. Alas. Rather than lose any nonexistent positives of my psyche, I've been gaining negatives at an even greater pace than usual. Sleep, in particular, has become a gruesome affair, to the point that I've decided to forgo it altogether.

The cause and subject of my most recent night terrors whistles a jaunty little tune, fingers threaded through his jagged blond hair as we follow Hatake to the Hokage Tower. It's still slightly damp, and I suddenly wonder when the last time we bathed together was. Too long. Far too long. I stamp down on a sudden rush of longing, inwardly lamenting that his hands should be bunched in _my _hair, just like mine should be in _his_.

It's been two weeks, four days, five hours, and approximately thirty-nine minutes, and I've realized that my current plan is not going to work. Shaping Naruto in the man that I know him to be is all well and good, but upon reflection, it had been our separation as loyal shinobi and missing nin that had ironically brought us together as man and woman.

That wouldn't be an option this time around. There were several, equally important reasons for this, ranging from my new understanding of the Uchiha Massacre to my conversation with the Rikudou Sennin. The most pressing of these was, of course, that Naruto wouldn't see me that way for several years to come if I walked the same path as before.

I am not a patient woman. Two weeks, four days, five hours, and approximately forty-one minutes was already dangerously close to my limit. And so, because I could not make him love me like I did before, and subtly opening myself up to him as a teammate and a sparring partner was not working nearly as well as I remembered, I was going to have to adjust my tactics.

I was going to have to make Naruto love me the _traditional _way. May Amaterasu cleanse my sinful soul.

"Actually, Kakashi, I was wondering if your team would be up to a C-rank mission today."

I blinked, realizing that we had reached the mission distribution center at some point during my sour musings. That was concerning. Situational awareness was something I had never bothered to improve, or even maintain, after keeping my fully matured sharingan active at all times became an option. That would have to change. Or I would have to get my sight back. Whichever came first.

"A C-rank, hm?" Kakashi pondered, tapping his pornographic book to his chin in thought. An unreadable brown eye focused on me for the briefest of moments, and I cocked an eyebrow. _Do you really need to ask? _

He quirked a little smile beneath his mask, attention sliding from me to Sakura. The other kunoichi was staring at the Hokage with an expression that was half jubilation and half anxiety. It made her look constipated, in my unbiased opinion. Kakashi turned his attention away from her when it became clear she didn't yet have an opinion to give, and locked eyes with Naruto.

Naruto... was smiling. Not grinning, dancing, screaming at the top of his lungs, or any other irritating alternative. He was just standing there, arms held loosely at his sides, looking up at Kakashi with a smile that made my heart race.

It's a smile I've seen before. A smile that I've seen bring women and enemy shinobi to their knees with little regard as to which was which, or which was _both_. It was a simple thing, a small parting of the lips, a flash of too-sharp canines. It made his eyes dance like lightning, deadlier than any raiton jutsu I knew.

I liked that smile. I liked it a lot.

"Let's do it."

Hnnnn.

"Well, if you're sure!" Kakashi said happily, as if Naruto's opinion was the only deciding factor in his decision. For all I knew, it was. I never did find out how much of his carefree attitude was an act before his violent death. "How may we serve, Hokage-sama?"

"Your client is a merchant from Yu no Kuni. He's finished his business with Konoha for the year and would like you to escort him back home, in case he runs into any unsavory characters during the trip. Ryoko, if you could fetch Kahaya-san?" The secretary standing dutifully by the mission desk hurried out of the room, and a few minutes after the Hokage finished up with the pre-mission pleasantries she returned with a portly old man in tow.

"Good morning, Hokage-sama! A pleasure, as always," Kahaya-san boomed, bowing as low as his gut would allow him. The merchant from Hot Water was dressed in well worn traveling clothes that matched his thinning gray hair, and he held himself with the ease of a civilian that knew they were at the mercy of every single shinobi in the room and had stopped caring long ago.

He was utterly forgettable, as was his mission. This part of our trip was unimportant. The real challenge would come later.

While Kakashi introduced us to the client and vice versa, I returned my attention to what was important. Namely, recapturing Naruto's heart. My quest to improve the younger, infinitely more irritating version of my beloved fool wasn't going as poorly as I liked to make it out to be, in all honesty. He had yet to do anything truly unacceptable- in fact, aside from the general Narutoisms that would be a part of him no matter what I did, he hadn't done _anything _annoying. It was somewhat frustrating that all it took was me treating him vaguely like an equal to radically change his demeanor- it made me wish I had done so sooner, the first time around.

Unfortunately, we weren't getting anywhere romantically. Which meant we also weren't getting anywhere physically. It's been so long since I've made him bleed. When was the last time I drove my cold steel through him? When was the last time he drove his wood into _me_?

Too long, on both accounts. Far too long.

Solutions, solutions. Traditional interactions as teammates has worked thus far in improving our interactions with one another. Perhaps a traditional romance will work much the same? His attraction to Sakura certainly seemed traditional enough, from what little I can remember of it before we drove it into the dirt with our own frenzied relationship.

Twelve year old Naruto preferred girls that wore perfume, dressed nicely, and had charming personalities. Eventually, he would come to his senses and prefer women that were me. Until then, I could play along.

"Alright, team, we'll meet at the northern gate in one hour. Pack carefully, and don't forget your rations!" Rations, hm?

I knew just where to start.

* * *

><p>"You made me... a bento?" Naruto stared at me with terrified eyes, as if the box of food I held in my hands was an exploding tag strapped to his littlest Uzumaki, and I was only a hand seal away from setting it off.<p>

Mm, that had been a good night.

"Yes," I replied evenly, not quite sure what to do now that I had prepared the food and presented it to him. My knowledge of traditional courtship was, admittedly, a bit lacking. Perhaps I wasn't being clear enough. "I thought you might like something more appetizing than field rations while we're away from Konoha."

Naruto took a half step backwards, and in my peripheral vision I noted Sakura watching us with complete bewilderment. Kakashi's expression was obscured by his book, but I got the feeling he was giggling more than he usually did. Was I still missing something? What did that Hyuuga bitch always do when she wanted to give him something?

"Please accept it," I murmured, turning my head demurely away from him.

There was a beat of silence. Even the chunin guarding the gates leaned forward in their booth to watch the spectacle. Naruto took a deep breath.

"_Kai._"

I very carefully did not stab him.

He took the bento, then, grinning sheepishly. He still looked a little shaken up, but I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything different. I had seen for myself how cold the rest of the village was to him- for all I knew, this was the first real gift he had ever received, small as it was. And wasn't that a depressing thought.

"Thanks, Sasuke," he said, holding the box about a foot away from his person. What would the Hyuuga do now?

I tapped my fingers together, averting my gaze once again. Amaterasu save me, I hated this already. How could that girl ever claim to have feelings for Naruto when she never _looked _at him? "I hope you like it," I said nonetheless.

"Sasuke?" Sakura squeaked. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," I replied, a moment too late realizing that the Hyuuga never spoke so coldly. Ah, well. I didn't actually want to _be_ Hyuuga Hinata. Just the thought of it made me feel dirty. And weak. And _pathetic_.

"So, uh, did you get Sakura one, or did you want us to share...?"

"No," I snapped. That was the very nearly the last thing I wanted, just below _not_ murdering Uchiha Madara. "It's for you." After a pause, I added. "For the lunch you bought me, before."

Uneasy silence settled amongst our team and the chunin who had nothing better to do. Our client had yet to arrive, which meant this was the perfect time for Naruto to eat the bento and realize what a good cook I am. Not that I had ever really cooked for him in the past, or had any plans to do so on a regular basis in the future. Regardless.

Eventually, he got the hint. "O-oh! Right!" He popped the bento open, his mouth falling open ever so slightly at its contents. I had considered shaping the rice balls into hearts or his face, but had dismissed the former as being too obvious and the latter as being a little sad. Instead, I had made one in the image of the Uzumaki spiral crest, and the other in the shape of an uchiwa. Simple and effective.

"It looks great," he offered. I raised an eyebrow at him. "Well, um... bottoms up-"

"Kakashi-san!" Kahaya bellowed, and Naruto slammed the bento shut with a sigh of relief. I crossed my arms over my chest, just barely restraining the urge to put my chokuto between the old man's eyes as he came huffing and puffing up to us. "I'm terribly sorry for the delay! I got caught up in some last minute goodbyes, and you know how those are-"

"Not a problem, Kahaya-san," Kakashi said, pocketing his book and giving me an incredibly amused look. "Shall we?" I scowled.

Next time.

* * *

>"Kakashi-sensei, where exactly are we going in Yu no Kuni?" Sakura asked some time later, when the sun had long since passed its apex and settled into its descent.<p>"A little resort village called Haru just off of Yugakure," Kakashi supplied, shielding his eye with his book and glancing up at the sky. "It'll take us a few days to get there at this pace, so we'll turn in for the night once we reach the next town."<p>

"Fan- fantastic idea," Kahaya wheezed, leaning heavily on his walking stick and doing his best not to have a heart attack. "I support it one hundred percent!"

"Is the town close?" Sakura asked hopefully, wiping the sweat from her massive brow. All things considered, it was a hellishly hot day. Even the encroaching evening did little for Hi no Kuni's infamous humidity.

Kakashi nodded. "Very close. Only three or four more hours if I remember correctly." He tilted his head, humming thoughtfully. "Although, that was at a jonin's pace, come to think of it." Sakura groaned miserably, and Naruto made a disgusted noise low in his throat, swinging his backpack around and rifling through it.

A few seconds later I realized what he was looking for and very casually reached into my own pack, pulling out my canteen and taking a slow, luxurious pull from it. I caressed the lip of it with my tongue, drinking deeply and pulling it out of my mouth with a soft pop. A few moments later Naruto cursed, throwing his pack back over his shoulder.

"Thirsty?"

Naruto looked to me, then my canteen, and swallowed. "Little bit."

"Take the rest," I said generously, offering him the bottle. I felt Kakashi's scrutiny on me, but didn't pay it any heed. He wouldn't interfere, and if he did, I'd end him.

Naruto's eyes lit up. "You sure?" he asked, nearly vibrating with the desire to snatch the water from my hand. I hummed my assent, tossing it to him, and he wasted no time guzzling it down.

I waited until he was finished. He sighed contentedly, wiping a bit of moisture from where it had run tantalizingly down his chin and throat, and offered the canteen back to me. I turned away from him, to his confusion, and channeled Hyuuga Hinata to the best of my ability as I buried my face in my hands.

"An indirect kiss," I whispered, wishing I knew how to blush on command.  
>Kakashi skillfully turned a snort into a polite cough, Sakura gaped, and Naruto did his best to choke on air.<p>

"What the _fuck_, Sasuke?"

Hn. Next time.

* * *

><p>The town we stopped for the night at, as well as the hotel Kakashi decided on, were exactly as I remembered them to be. Quaint, spacious, and with far too many available places to stay. Kahaya was given a room of his own, being that he was the one paying, while Kakashi and Naruto took another, leaving me with Sakura. Too much space to force us all into one room, but not spacious enough to get me away from Sakura. Unfortunate.<p>

I would have very little time to accomplish the next stage of my plan, for this younger body of mine remained a genin's frame, for all my S-class knowledge, and Kakashi was a seasoned jonin. I wasn't confident enough in my current infiltration skills to risk sneaking into his room and extracting Naruto. I would have to make what time I had count.

And so it was that I found myself bathing in the men's hot springs, having cleared it out of any and all inhabitants with a few carefully placed words and even more carefully placed kunai.

I squeezed the sponge the hotel staff had provided in my room, along with various other toiletries, and gently ran it between my thighs. It slid down to the tips of my toes, leaving suds in its wake, and then ghosted back up my pale white skin on its way to my neck. I cleansed the sweat and grime from my body with all the grace of a noblewoman, one stroke at a time, humming all the while to a song that one of my aunts used to sing to me before Itachi brutally murdered her.

When I was covered head to toe in soap and shampoo, well and truly clean, I rinsed it all away with a few buckets of water. Then I listened intently, and when I heard nothing, picked the sponge back up and started washing again.

I was on my third cycle of scrubbing when I heard the door to the changing room open with a sharp rap. I smiled slowly, rising from my stool and stretching languidly, naked as the day I was born. The door to the hot springs slid open, and I heard a sharp intake of breath from a familiar set of lungs. I smiled even wider and bent at the waist to grab my most recent bucket of water.

"Hnngh."

"Naruto," I said, injecting as much surprise and indignation as possible into the name. It was difficult, but the fact that he couldn't see my devious smile helped me somewhat. "This is the women's bath, you know."

I emptied the bucket over my head, shaking the moisture out of my air and perhaps wiggling my hips ever so slightly.

"The hell it is," Naruto bit out, far more indignantly than I had managed. That's fine. I like angry Naruto more than flustered Naruto anyway. Not much, but enough to measure.

I turned just enough to give him a wide-eyed look. "I picked the wrong one?" Naruto crossed his arms over his bare chest- _Mmm_- unamused. "I see," I said softly.

I had considered channeling the Hyuuga again for this one, but had dismissed the situation as being too extreme for such a persona. Stammering like one of Orochimaru's lackies or fainting dead away would do nothing for me. I had also considered channeling Sakura. Don't ask me why.

In the end, I decided on a middle of the road approach.

I bent down once again, picked the sponge up, and gestured to my stool. "Would you like me to wash your back?"

Naruto walked back into the changing room without another word.

Damn it. _Next time_.


	5. Chapter 5

**My name is Uzumaki Naruto.** I am and was a shinobi of Konoha. I was eighteen years old when Uchiha Madara killed me. I died as the Gama Sennin, the strongest loyal Konoha shinobi in my generation- Tsunade's heir apparent, if the rumors that always seemed to be floating around were true. I died defending the village I loved, the village that had come to love me. I'd do it again, too, no questions asked.

So I died. And then I woke up, sans puberty.

Go figure.

I've been on the go a lot since then. Relearning this stocky little frame of mine, getting a handle on the tangled mess that is my chakra system, and beating myself to death via shadow clones. I've been busy. I've learned a few things leading up to and after my death, but there's still so much I don't know. My journey is far from over.

My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I'm here to save the world.

"It's a big popsicle for just one person, i-is all I'm saying. D-don't get the wrong idea."

My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I have no idea what the_ fuck _is going on.

I looked pleadingly to Kakashi, but he was conveniently busy accepting our client's thanks for our job well done. I turned to Sakura, but all she had to offer me was a wondering shrug of her shoulders. And then, with nowhere else to go, I settled on Sasuke, and the popsicle she was bashfully holding out to me. She'd picked it up from one of the local vendors in Haru to stave off the heat, and was determined to share it. With me.

I shivered.

There was something wrong with this timeline. I didn't know what it was, and I didn't know if I had the Rikudou Sennin or myself to blame for it, but there was something _wrong_. I knew of two Uchiha Sasuke- one was a girl that didn't care about anything but killing her genocidal older brother, and the other was a woman that didn't care about anything but driving me insane. Sexually. This new Sasuke, this _imposter_, was like nothing I've ever seen.

She was cute. Not just cute in appearance, because she had always been attractive, but in behavior, too. She was demure. The Sasuke I knew forced eye contact whenever she could because it made twisting my head into knots with genjutsu easier. This new Sasuke _looked away _when I tried to meet her eye.

She made bento, engineered indirect kisses, and snuck into the wrong bath just to catch my attention. And when I finally confronted her about it the next day, what was her response?

_"I don't l-like you or anything, i-idiot."_

She started stammering and denying any interest in me so poorly even I realized what was going on. She had a crush on me. Uchiha Sasuke had a perfectly normal crush on me, and was embarrassed because of it.

She hadn't even tried to stab me once. Something was _wrong_.

"You know, Sakura looks like she could use a popsicle," I pointed out, because mentioning my pink-haired teammate has been the only way to get a familiar response from Sasuke since we walked out of the village gates. Also, Sakura actually was looking pretty frazzled by the heat.

Full, pink lips twisted into the briefest of snarls before smoothing out into a pout. I saw it, though. I _saw it_. "Don't make me say it," she said, not pleading so much as demanding. She wiggled the fruity treat enticingly, but I made no move to take it. I didn't trust that popsicle.

Sasuke stomped a sandaled foot, fed up, and maybe I jumped a few inches off the ground in response. Maybe.

"I want to share it with you!"

"Okay, okay! We'll share it!" It was too much. I've gutted armies and gone toe to toe with bijuu, but flustered Sasuke was just too much. I snatched the popsicle out of her hand, took the top half of it off in one bite, and promptly offered it back.

"You took too long," she said accusingly, splaying the fingers of her now empty hand to show off the sticky orange juice from the popsicle. "Clean them off."

"With what?" I asked, kicking myself as soon as the words left my mouth. What else?

Her lips twitched again, this time into a wicked smirk, before transitioning into an embarrassed grimace quick as a flash. I saw it all the same. You can't fool me, Sasuke. I'm on to you. I'm-

"Use your- your mouth," she mumbled.

Alright. Time for a tactical retreat.

* * *

><p>"-you think, Naruto?"<p>

"Wha-?" I blinked, coming back to my senses just in time to run face first into the back of my sensei. Being the littlest of shinobi, physically at least, I bounced right off of him. Twisting in midair, I quickly latched onto a nearby tree branch and swung myself up onto it, casting wildly around for a threat. It's not happening yet, is it? It can't be, can it?

But no, we've just stopped. I coughed, turning away from Kakashi's pointed gaze. "What was that?"

"I asked if you wanted to take a quick detour. There's a monument close by that I thought you might like to see."

Oh. _Oh. _"Yeah, definitely!" I cried, a little more loudly than I intended in my haste to correct my mistake. I can't believe I almost missed this. What if they had decided against it while I was wrapped up in my thoughts and ruined _everything?_

The rest of my team watched, bemused, as I conjured up a pair of kage bunshin to slap me harshly across the face, one after the other.

"Get your head in the game," Naruto clone on the left snapped. I nodded.

"Yes."

"And watch your eight o' clock," Naruto clone on the right advised. Sasuke, from her place at my eight 'o clock, raised an eyebrow. I nodded, more firmly this time.

"Right," I said. Then I grabbed them both by their wild blond hair and slammed their heads together, dispelling them in one big cloud of chakra smoke. "So! What about that monument, sensei?"

"It's a bit less than an hour off the beaten path, if we stick to the treetops," Kakashi said, ignoring my hysterics with practiced ease. "Follow me, you three, and try to keep up!" And then he's off, leading us away from Konoha just as suddenly as the first time around.

As we raced through the trees I found Sasuke stutter-stepping so as to match her pace to mine, glancing at me with muted concern in her bottomless midnight eyes. "You okay?"

I laughed lightly, shaking my head. All this agonizing over my master plan and Sasuke's strange behavior, I hadn't even noticed that I was slipping up, myself. It was... something of a bad habit of mine. Being a sage, especially my kind of sage, meant a lot of things. It meant you had a certain understanding of nature- a _connection_, say- that gave you a unique perspective of...

Well, everything.

The best example I could think of was suddenly looking out through the eyes of Hyuuga after a lifetime of blindness. Being a sage wasn't a simple jump from normal to exceptional perception. It was something entirely new. If the average civilian had five senses, and the average shinobi had all those plus a sixth sense for chakra, I had _seven_.

I could be in a thousand different places at once, experience a thousand different kinds of life in ways that still boggled my mind to this day. I could get completely and utterly lost in the simple flow of nature for minutes, hours,and on and on if I wasn't paying attention and there was no one around to keep track of me. It was frustrating as hell, honestly. And eventually, as I spent more and more of my time wrapped up in the throes of mother nature, that absentmindedness started to bleed over into my day to day life.

I've never been the most focused guy in the world, but sometimes it's just ridiculous how off track I get.

Like _right now_. Fuck.

"Sure, sure!" I said. "Guess I'm a little bored with how the mission's been going so far, you know?" Sasuke hummed in vague agreement. "But yeah, I'm fine. Thanks."

"Good," She said absently, before seemingly coming to a realization and gasping. "D-don't get me wrong, I wasn't w-worried about you or anything!"

"Stop that!" I cried, pushing off the next branch in my path with perhaps a little more force than necessary in my indignation and snapping it cleanly off the tree it's connected to. Sasuke expertly changed her flight through the air to land on a different branch, resuming her pace alongside me a moment later with an adorable scowl on her face.

"S-stop what? Idiot!"

"_That! _That thing you're doing with your personality! Cut it out!"

"What's wrong with my personality!?"

"It's all wrong," I jabbed an accusing finger at her. "You were acting cutesy yesterday, and today you're all flustered. Like you're some girl fresh out of the Academy!"

For the briefest of moments, Sasuke looked unsure of herself. "Aren't I?" I opened my mouth to loudly deny her, and then snapped my teeth together.

Wait. Wasn't she?

That, I realized, was the crux of my discomfort with the situation. Up until now, I've been working with certain expectations in mind when it comes to my team, and Sasuke especially. Certain expectations like, say, them acting the way they're god damn supposed to at this point in time. This sudden shift in the way the old- young?- love of my life was treating me was throwing me off something fierce.

The issue was, while Sasuke may have technically been a beautiful young girl fresh out of the Academy, she definitely hadn't acted like it the first time around. She had been icy, distant, and in constant control of herself. On the rare occasion she was pushed outside of her comfort zone, she was pushed towards wrath, not _embarrassment. _So why the sudden change? It wasn't like I had made any big changes, yet.

Was treating her a little more kindly all it would have taken to win Sasuke over, the first time? No, no, I refused to accept that. Sasuke had no shortage of boys _and _girls pining after her in the Academy. I was far from the first.

Which meant one of two things. Either the Rikudou Sennin had made a mistake and I had gotten lost somewhere in my transmigration, making this some bizarre alternate reality where Sasuke had a crush on me and was shy about it, or... Or?

I stiffened. "Or," I murmured, glancing over at Sasuke. "Did you-?"

She tilted her head, looking away from the path ahead and locking eyes with me. "Did I what?" Her expression was still vaguely huffy, but not in the same over the top way she had been projecting her emotions for the last two days. Her pitch black gaze bored into me, prodding me for my secrets- I've always thought her eyes were more striking without the sharingan.

Could she have-?

_First I lost him to **that woman**, and now I've lost you to **myself**? I won't allow it. I'll never allow it!_

I shuddered and jerked away from her, onto a different branch, suddenly unable to look at her for even a single second more.

"Never mind," I said, shaking my head and furiously banishing the errant memory. Couldn't dwell. Never dwell. "Ne, Sakura! Spare me some water?"

"Why didn't you buy some while we were dropping the client off!?"

"I forgot!" I cried, forcing a grin into place and speeding on ahead to catch up to my pink-haired teammate. "Have mercy on me, just this once!"

I didn't look back to Sasuke for the rest of our impromptu detour. I knew that if I did, it would be the end of me. One way or another.

* * *

><p>The Valley of the End was pretty imposing when it was intact and not completely destroyed.<p>

"Wow," Sakura breathed, and I quirked an actual smile at the awe in her voice.

Kakashi had taken us the side route, so that we came out at the bottom of the waterfall looking up at the two titanic statues that had given the man-made valley its name. There were still a few hours of pure sunlight left before dusk, so both legendary shinobi were lit in all their shining glory. I raised a hand against the light, gazing up at Senju and Uchiha with a funny combination of emotions roiling in my stomach.

"Who are they, sensei?" I asked for my teammates' benefit. I knew these two very, very well.

"The founders of Konoha," Kakashi said, pausing just long enough for Sakura to gasp in realization.

"I know them!" She said, her grass green eyes shining with excitement as she pointed from one statue to the other. "That's the Shodai Hokage, Senju Hashirama, and _that's_ the first Matriarch of the Uchiha clan-" She immediately cut herself off, looking worriedly to the side, and I finally allowed myself to look to my other teammate.

"Uchiha Madara," Sasuke finished, her tone flat, inscrutable.

"Very good," Kakashi congratulated the both of them, dismissing the sudden tension as if it had never existed in the first place. Maybe it hadn't, to him. "Now, does anyone know their story? And more specifically, why those statues are here on the edge of Hi no Kuni and not closer to Konoha?"

Yes, yes I did. "Nope."

Sasuke shrugged.

"Sorry, sensei," Sakura apologized, and wow, she actually did sound sorry.

"Great!" Kakashi clapped his hands together, and with the motion disappeared in a shimmer of leaves. I crossed my arms while Sakura balked, squinting up into the sunlight. If I remembered correctly, he'd be right...

"There," Sasuke murmured, pointing to the Shodai's armored right shoulder a moment after I alight on Kakashi, waving down at us invitingly.

"He wants us to go up there?" Sakura squeaked. Ah, right. We hadn't known tree walking yet, so we'd been forced to maneuver our way up the various bits of armor and weaponry jutting out of the Shodai's statue. It had taken a while, and I don't remember enjoying it all that much.

Yeah, not twice.

"_Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!_"

"_Wah! _Naruto, what are you doing!?" Sakura cried as one of my clones scooped her up in his arms, bridal style, and took off for the Shodai's statue.

"Hold on tight, Sakura!" I called as my other clone wrangled Sasuke into an appropriate hold. "And try not to break him on the way up!" She screamed something incomprehensible in reply as my clone leaped up onto the statue and started scaling it vertically.

Hm, now that I thought about it, I probably could have taught her how to do the tree walking exercise in a minute or two. Her chakra control was pretty much perfect, even now.

... Ah, well.

A pained grunt and an influx of memories alerted me to my other clone's swift death a bare second before Sasuke deposited herself on my back, wrapping her shapely legs- thirteen years old, _thirteen years old_- tightly around my waist. She settled her chin in the crook of my neck, her arms hanging loosely over my shoulders, and sighed contentedly. I twitched.

"If you want to carry me, you can do it yourself," she whispered into my ear. Hnngh. Fine. Be that way.

I hit the statue at a run, and when I turned vertical Sasuke tightened her hold on me accordingly, molding her body to mine. I made this sort of strangled noise low in my throat as I felt her chest press up against my back, but did my best to otherwise ignore it and work my way up the Shodai's oddly styled armor. Sasuke spoke directly into my ear again, just as softly as before, her breath hot on my skin.

"When did you learn this, dead last?"

I hummed, casting around for a believable answer. What to say, what to say.

"I forget, actually."

Nailed it.

"Idiot," she said, almost fondly. I flashed her a wry smile, jumping from the pommel of the Shodai's blade to his voluminous sleeve.

When we finally made it to the shoulder I found Kakashi waiting for us with a speculative air about him. Sakura was just off to the side with her arms crossed, listening to my clone's profuse apologies with barely contained amusement behind her glare. I rolled my eyes, walking over and smacking him upside the head. Pop.

"That's enough of that." I paused, shifting from foot to foot for a moment, and when I continued to be heavier than I should be at this age, I glanced over my shoulder. "You can get down now, you know."

Sasuke silently considered that.

"I-it's not like I _want_ to stay like this-"

"Off, now!"

* * *

><p><strong>My name is Uchiha Sasuke. <strong>I am currently a shinobi of Konoha, though I was one of their more infamous missing nin up until my death. I was nineteen years old when Uchiha Madara killed me. I died as the Uchiha Matriarch, the strongest missing nin in my generation. I died avenging the man I loved, the man that had come to love me. I'd do it again, too, so long as I actually _succeeded _this time.

To recap, I died. Then I woke up roughly six years before the fact, sans puberty.

Hn.

My life has been an exercise in frustration since then. Teaching this pitiful young body of mine the proper way to move, wresting control back from the elements that I had bent to my will long ago, and driving myself even more insane than I already am trying to subtly regain Naruto's affections. I didn't do too poorly in my first quest for vengeance, but there are so many people that I haven't killed yet, and even more that I'll have to kill again. My journey has only just begun.

My name is Uchiha Sasuke, and I'm here to kill Madara.

"Off, now! Off, off, off!"

My name is Uchiha Sasuke, and I am _rapidly _losing my patience.

I hopped off Naruto's back with an annoyed huff, reigning in the urge to stab him for what might have been the hundredth time in the past two days. I had to remember that this Naruto wouldn't recognize that for the affectionate and inviting gesture as it was. He certainly wouldn't throw me down onto the stone and return the favor like he did the last time we met at the Valley of the End. Probably.

"Now that we're all here," Kakashi said, halting my thoughtful musings. "How much do you three know about Konoha's founding?"

All of it. "Hn."

"The guy we're standing on did stuff with, uh, trees, right?" Naruto asked more than answered. Kakashi nodded encouragingly, patting the Shodai's neck.

"Trees were part of it, but his bloodline was a little broader than that in scope. The wood release, _mokuton_, allowed him to combine his water and earth affinities- we'll talk about affinities later, don't worry, Sakura- in order to create wood. It gave him all the flexibility of _suiton _and _doton_ with neither of their drawbacks." Kakashi glanced at Naruto ever so briefly, an action I would have missed completely if I wasn't exponentially more perceptive than I should have been at this age.

"His mokuton also had the unprecedented ability to restrain the nine Bijuu, which many would say is the primary reason for his legendary status."

He was wrong, of course. So laughably wrong that I scoffed a little in spite of myself, but I didn't press the issue. It hardly mattered, in the end- it was a simple technicality. Naruto would show them the truth in due time.

"Of course, there was much more to him than that," Kakashi continued, smiling lightly at me. I shrugged. "But maybe it would be best to start at the beginning.

"Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama were born in the Warring Clans Era, back when ninjutsu and other modern arts played minor roles in what was otherwise a setting dominated by taijutsu and kenjutsu. Madara was the first Matriarch her clan had ever seen, and was said to have the most powerful sharingan in existence. Hashirama-sama was, of course, the Patriarch of the Senju clan, and we've already been over his mokuton. They were... rather close," he finished wryly.

And what an understatement that was.

"I always wondered why that was. Weren't their clans enemies in the Warring Clans Era?" Sakura asked, puzzled.

"Doubtlessly," Kakashi agreed. "But something like bad blood generally isn't a concern when love is involved."

I rolled my eyes as Sakura gasped, predictably lighting up with prepubescent glee at the concept of forbidden love. I glanced sidelong at Naruto to see what he thought of the revelation, only to find him sitting cross legged on the stone, back to us. He was close enough to be clearly listening, but his attention was just as clearly fixated on the statue across from us.

Uchiha Madara's statue was every bit as intimidating and beautiful as the woman herself. Her anciently styled armor hugged her lithe form around her chest and legs, and hung more loosely around her arms and midsection to allow for unhindered movement. Her hair, so similar to how mine would be in a few more years, flared up in wild, defiant spikes at the crown of her head, and then cascaded down her back in frenzied, choppy waves.

I've been told more than once by people who would know that my hair is an affront to women around the world. Whenever the topic came up, though, Naruto said he loved it. So fuck those people.

"Madara and the Shodai?" Sakura asked excitedly. "I've never heard about that before! What happened? And how?"

Kakashi chuckled, but there was little mirth in it. "I can understand why your instructors at the Academy might have glossed over it. It isn't a very happy story, in the end." Naruto leaned forward, elbows settling on his knees as he contemplated the woman that had killed him in a world that I would never allow to exist again.

"They didn't admit it to one another until it was already too late. During the war, they were both too busy keeping their respective clans alive and well while forging an alliance in secret. Things were only further complicated when Madara's younger brother, Izuna, died at the hands of Hashirama-sama's younger brother, Tobirama-sama."

"The Nidaime," Sakura breathed. Kakashi nodded.

"Eventually, they both became so fed up with the status quo that they declared their clans to be allies, which came as a complete surprise to everyone but themselves. With reluctant help from both clans, though Hashirama is said to have done most of the work, they created Konoha.

"As it turned out, that was the spark the rest of the world needed to move past the Warring Clans Era, and dozens of different clans hurried to erect their own hidden villages in Konoha's image. We were the best example at the time, though, which is why so many talented shinobi clans decided to ally themselves with us in the beginning. Sounds like a happy ending, doesn't it?" He sighed ruefully, tapping his porn against his leg. "Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the end of it."

"Madara wanted to be Hokage," I murmured, because I couldn't _not _say it, such was the sheer force of my disbelief. I still couldn't believe what that idiotic woman had thrown away for some worthless hat and robes.

"She did. The majority of the village, however, preferred Hashirama-sama for the position. Even a portion of her own clan, although they never admitted it to her. Tobirama-sama was particularly vocal in his opposition, which swayed most of the neutral clans in Hashirama-sama's favor. And..." He shrugged, single eye quirking. "Well, you all know which of them is carved into the Hokage Mountain."

"What did Madara do, then?" Sakura asked.

"She didn't take it well." Understatements abound. "She defected, in the end, claiming that with Hashirama-sama as the Shodai Hokage and Tobirama-sama as his likely successor, the Uchiha clan would never receive the same considerations that the Senju did. And to be fair-" Kakashi paused, seemingly reconsidering his words, though I knew for a fact that he had only said exactly as much as he meant to say. "Well, anyway, Hashirama-sama pursued her all the way to the edge of Hi no Kuni, where they clashed..."

He hummed, squinting his single visible eye and pointing to some arbitrary point at the top of the waterfall. "There."

"To make a very long story short, they began their fight on a flat plain, and they ended it with this," he waved a hand at the valley below us. His voice was dry as he continued, "In case you hadn't made the connection, they were very powerful."

"Wow," Sakura whispered, looking upon the valley with new found respect. "Who won?"

"No one," Naruto said quietly. My eyes narrowed. How did he-

"Got it in one. Before either of them could deal a finishing blow, Madara confessed her feelings for Hashirama-sama." I closed my eyes, unable to look at Sakura's enraptured expression without being physically sickened. This was just some historical drama to her. It wasn't _real_.

"Hashirama-sama admitted that he felt the same for her, to her joy, but before she could whisk him off on a likely permanent honeymoon, he also admitted that he was already engaged to another woman." Sakura gasped in horror, and Kakashi nodded grimly. "Uzumaki Mito was the daughter of Uzushiogakure's clan head, as well as a master of fuinjutsu, making her an ideal wife for Hashirama-sama."

I didn't miss the way Sakura's attention flickered to Naruto at the mention of his surname. Oh, if only she knew.

"Hashirama-sama loved Madara, but he loved Konoha more, and in time he would come to love Mito-sama just as much. That, coupled with Madara's defection, meant they could never be together romantically."

"What did she...?" Sakura trailed off.

"She didn't take it well," I echoed.

"Not at all," Kakashi agreed. "The pain of his rejection on top of the events that had forced her from Konoha in the first place ended up pushing her over the edge. She experienced something of a mental break, and fled from Hashirama-sama, tearfully declaring-"

Naruto yawned explosively, leaning back and rubbing at his eyes with the palms of his hands. "Sorry, sensei. Heat's starting to get to me. I'm gonna take a quick dip, wake myself up a bit." He stretched his arms above his head, blinking blearily against the sun-

Was he _tearing up?_

He leaped off the Shodai's shoulder before I could get a good look, disappearing into the waterfall without a ripple to mark his passage. I frowned, running the brief flash I had seen of him through my head again and cursing myself for not having my sharingan active to burn it into my memory.

"Tearfully declaring," Kakashi continued, his voice uncharacteristically somber following Naruto's outburst. "That she would not rest until she had wiped out the Uzumaki clan in its entirety for taking away the man she loved."

He paused for a long moment in the ensuing silence, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "Or so the story goes."

Oh yes. I was going to kill that cunt good.

* * *

><p>The real mission began abruptly.<p>

One moment we were loping through the trees of Hi no Kuni in silence, Kakashi apparently content to let us process his story at our own pace, and the next we were ground to a halt by said jonin. I perched gracefully on one of the flimsier branches, eying the raised hand he had stopped us with. Contrary to the cool neutrality I was carefully maintaining, my heart began to pound. It wouldn't be long, now. Just another moment before he caught the trail.

"Someone just stumbled into an ambush," he said lightly, though he didn't move an inch. "A rather nasty one, if I'm not mistaken."

Sakura gasped. "Wha- who!? This is Hi no Kuni!"

"We're closer to the border than you might think, actually," Kakashi said, waving the hand he was holding up dismissively. "I can't tell who is who from this distance. I'd have to get closer. What say you three?"

It took me a moment to process the question. This was new. Kakashi hadn't bothered to ask us whether or not we wanted to help out the first time around.

"Let's help them," Naruto said immediately. Kakashi inclined his head, then turned expectantly to me.

I smirked, ever so slightly. "Hn."

"Sakura?" Kakashi asked the final member of the team, and perhaps it was only my own wishful thinking, but it sounded like a formality more than anything else. He'd already made his decision.

"We have to at least check, don't we?" Sakura responded nonetheless, nervous but resolute.

"Then we're decided!" Kakashi gave us all a big smile. "Follow along behind me, and try to keep pace, children!" And then he flickered and blurred off to the east.

"C'mon, guys!" Naruto bellowed, and I allowed myself to relax as life sprang back into him. "Let's kick some ass!"

It didn't take us long to find them at the pace Kakashi set. A scant handful of minutes after our abrupt halt I burst out of the treetops onto a civilian road, sharingan spinning to life in my eyes and throwing everything into sudden clarity. Naruto was seconds behind me, belting out kage bunshin before he even cleared the treeline.

There were just over a dozen shinobi present, in total. Five Konoha shinobi in standard chunin garb and eight in the washed out reds and browns of Iwa. Two of the chunin from Konoha were already down, probably dead- it didn't matter. The other two were fiercely railing against the Iwa contingency, naked wrath on their faces.

And then Naruto leaped past me, into the fray, and it all turned orange. I shook my head, smirking in full force, and pushed off just as Sakura touched down on the branch beside me.

"Sasuke-!" She cried, voice nearly drowned out by the cacophony of battle cries Naruto's clones were howling into the air. "What do I do!?"

"_Watch_."

I tore through the crowd of clones gleefully, and with every sweep of my chokuto my blood _sang_. Finally, I cut through a clone that had an Iwa nin on the other side of it. The tomoe in each of my eyes whirled in anticipation as he spun to face me, baring his teeth.

He was tall, standing head and shoulders above me. His hair was brown and cropped closely to his head, with a crimson Iwa headband tied snugly to his headband. He was also wearing some sort of flak jacket, but any further observations were dismissed in favor my lunging forward and burying my chokuto in his throat.

He dodged, naturally, and for a split second I was shocked. Then I remembered my sharingan was still immature, and smiled viciously. Oh well- it was more fun like this, anyway!

I drove him back into the throng of clones, allowing the flimsy copies to knock him off balance with gut punches and tackles whenever he looked ready to start a jutsu, but dispelling them with my dancing blade otherwise. This was my first real fight since my transmigration, and I was going to _savor it_.

It seemed he was a joint ninjutsu and taijutsu specialist, as after the first thirty seconds or so of being thwarted mid-jutsu, he abandoned the effort entirely and rushed me head on. My smile widened, showing teeth, and my sharingan whirled ever faster. I drifted onto the back foot as he pushed me out of the crowd, lashing out at me with big, flashy punches that reminded me of the Strong Fist. One part intimidation, one part crushing force.

All parts _vulnerable._

I flicked my left hand at the wrist, sending a length of razor-thin wire lunging across the open air between us quick as a snake. It coiled around his right arm, overextended in a positively _sloppy _punch, and with a deft yank I threw his guard wide open. I opened my eyes wide and darted forward, spinning in a half circle to build momentum and punching my chokuto cleanly through his heart.

Nameless Iwa nin stared down at me with roughly the same amount of shock and horror that any Iwa nin did when they saw me. Or any Kiri nin, for that matter. Hn, Kumo...?

A sharp push to his chest freed up my sword, and with one last flick of the wrist my wire came free, coiling obediently around my wrist. That was one. I peered into the chaos Naruto had dropped onto the fight, searching for enemy corpses, and came up with one, two, three, four-

Five dead, including my own. _Already?_

I quickly darted back into the fray. Like hell I was going to come away from this with anything less than three!

* * *

><p>"Naruto, please calm down!" Sakura pleaded.<p>

"Let me at her!" Naruto snarled, furious sky blue eyes locked accusingly on me. "Just this once, just for a second!" I raised an eyebrow.

"Not worth it!" Naruto clone on the right snapped, struggling to maintain his hold on the original.

"She'll make it weird," Naruto clone on the left agreed, struggling every bit as much to hold his creator back.

"She burned my stuff!"

"I'm sure she didn't do it on purpose," Sakura insisted. I was tempted to tell the truth, just to contradict her, but I supposed it was a bit too early to play my hand.

"Bullshit! The fight was over and she knew it," Naruto said, more to me than her. He paused in his thrashing long enough to shoot clone no the left a look. "Hey, that hurts."

"Ah, sorry boss." Clone on the left adjusted his grip. "Better?"

"Yeah, that's fine."

"I'm very sorry for burning your belongings, Naruto," I apologized, bowing my head just enough that I couldn't reasonably be accused of mocking him. Naruto understood, though- he always had. "Please, allow me to repay you however you see fit."

"_You-_" he ground out, and I had the sudden urge to laugh. Foolish mistake, dead last.

"You want me?" I asked softly, and when his clones began to loudly deny the fact, I allowed my amusement to show through. I had decided shortly after the detour to the Valley of the End that pretending to be a traditional love interest was far too much work for far too little reward, and moved on in my planning accordingly.

I could win his heart without any facades. It seemed I'd just have to be a bit more direct.

"Mah, could you three spare your sensei a moment?" Kakashi called from his place down the road, where he'd been conversing with the surviving Konoha nin and the reason for their ambush.

My eyes narrowed as they fell upon the client, a middle-aged, diminutive noble sagging beneath the weight of his expensive robes and jewelry. He was balding, and what hair he did have left was rapidly fading to gray. His eyes were green and sharp, but with paranoia rather than any sort of intelligence- in my modest opinion, at any rate. His weathered skin and peculiar fashion would have tipped me off to his origins even if I hadn't already met him the first time around.

"How about we introduce ourselves?" Kakashi suggested when we walked- or were dragged, in Naruto's case- over to the adults. "This is-"

Miura Akira. Noble of Kaze no Kuni. Loyal friend and one of many advisers to the Wind Daimyo.

Dead man walking.

"A pleasure to meet you," he greeted us cordially, once names had been exchanged. "It is certainly reassuring to see the next generation of Konoha's shinobi is so skilled! Why, I don't know what we would have done without your intervention."

Sakura did her best to wave the praise away for all three of us, and to my surprise she was the only one to do so. Naruto, bashful to a fault when it came to such things, just considered the foreign noble for a moment. I watched him watch Miura, getting the feeling that Kakashi was watching all of us at once, until he seemed to come to a decision. He nodded once, and the clones on either side of him went up in smoke.

"Is there anything we can do for your teammates?" He asked the three chunin hanging back, bypassing the noble entirely. One of them flinched, turning tear-stained cheeks away from his concerned blue eyes, and another laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. The third sighed.

"Nothing we haven't already tried. They're gone."

Naruto promptly bowed his head, a real bow, not the faintly mocking brand that I had given him moments before. "I'm sorry we didn't come sooner."

And he was.

I silently sighed, something inside me softening at the emotion in the gesture. He really made it far too difficult to mess with him, sometimes. But then again, I suppose he also made it just as easy to love him.

The three chunin hesitated for the barest of moments, but then the one that had responded to Naruto's first question bowed his head in return. "You did your best. We could not possibly ask you anything more." Naruto's jaw worked with the effort of holding back what he wanted to say in response. I could already hear it in the echos of my memory- 'Of _course _you can. It's my job to protect you, and I failed! You _have _to ask me for more.'

He really was a fool, even now.

"We've been discussing a few things," Kakashi gently cut in. "Kuboto-san, Yosano-san, and Tatsuno-san are part of a team that Miura-san hired to accompany him on his travels through Hi no Kuni, before escorting him back to Kaze no Kuni's capital."

"We had roughly two more weeks of travel time scheduled before the escort back to Kaze no Kuni," the clear senior of the three chunin said wearily. "However..."

"I am quite ready to return," Miura said quickly. "In light of recent events, I would rather not burden you any longer than is necessary." The senior chunin nodded in thanks.

"Which brings us to the current situation," Kakashi said, gesturing to the junior chunin. "Kuboto-san doesn't feel he's in the proper condition to finish the mission, and Tatsuno-san would like Yasuno-san to accompany him back to Konoha along with their teammates." Their corpses. "He's asked for our assistance in completing the mission, in case another incident occurs."

"I want to think this was just a case of us being at the wrong part of the border at the wrong time," the senior member, Tatsuno, explained. He ran a hand through his straight, shoulder-length hair, grimacing. "But I'd feel much better with Hatake-san present." He smiled wryly. "And yourselves, of course."

"So!" Kakashi clapped his hands together, thankfully not disappearing in a body flicker this time. "What do you say?"

I pondered how exactly to phrase my next words so as not to appear overly interested, but Naruto thankfully beat me to the punch. "We'll do it," he said with conviction, and Sakura's teeth clicked shut around whatever she was about to say. She shot me a questioning glance. Of course we were going. There was still so much left to do.

"Fine," I said. That seemed to be enough for Sakura.

"Wonderful, wonderful!" Miura cried. "You have my sincerest thanks, shinobi of Konoha. I won't forget this, I assure you." He wouldn't be in a position to forget or remember much of anything at all, soon enough, but I didn't say that. I wanted to, though.

"Yes, yes," Kakashi said, moving away from the group and gesturing for the two junior chunin to follow him. "I'm going to see if I can't provide a few guides for our friends before they set out for Konoha. In the meanwhile, why don't you three help Tatsuno-san find a suitable place to set up camp?"

"Yes, sensei," Sakura replied dutifully. Naruto got halfway through an obliging nod before he froze, eyes widening in fury. I felt a little thrill race through me at the sight of it.

"You _burnt my tent_, bastard!"

And so it was that hours later, after dusk had well and truly fallen on our little campsite, I decided purely out of the goodness of my heart to allow Naruto to use my tent for the night.

"Um."

With me still in it, of course.

"Well? Are you coming in or not?" I asked archly, sitting patiently inside my sleeping bag.

Naruto hesitated, eyes locked on the slim black undershirt I had stripped down to while he waffled around outside. He swallowed. "Y'know, maybe I'll just keep watch for tonight. Can't be too careful, ne?" He spun around, all but lunging through the opening in my tent.

"_Naruto._" My voice lashed out, a sharp whip crack that stopped him cold halfway through the opening. I sighed, softening my tone ever so slightly. "I burnt your tent. Please use mine."

"... Yeah, alright."

He ducked back into the tent with the air of a defeated samurai. It was only an individual tent, so there wasn't much room for anything aside from my sleeping bag, but that didn't stop him from trying to sprawl out in the corner. I rolled my eyes, amused in spite of myself.

"Just get in the sleeping bag, idiot."

"But- you- gah!" He threw his hands up. "Fine!" Tossing his jacket, headband, and sandals into the same corner he had just been trying to huddle himself into, my blond fool shimmied defiantly inside my sleeping bag with me. He promptly turned his back to me, straining to negate as much contact as possible. I shook my head and smiled.

There were a lot of experiences that weren't going to be the same between the two of us, this time around. Couldn't possibly be the same, considering the changes I was planning to make. Thus, the experiences that I _could _recreate, I was damn well going to. This was one of the earliest, back when there really had been nothing between us. I actually _had_ burned his tent by mistake that first time, and he had all but forced himself into mine as a result.

It was slightly different this time, if only because I had already begun to change how I treated him, but it was enough. I shifted my bare legs, stretching them out just so and brushing them against him. He stiffened, and I stifled a laugh.

Eventually, Naruto relaxed and drifted off to sleep, and as soon as he rolled over I was there. I shifted and wiggled against him, amusing myself with thoughts of him waking up to the sensation of it, until I found myself more or less wrapped up in his arms. I buried my head in the crook of his neck, exhaling in hysterical relief as I melted into him. For the first time in I don't know how long, I relaxed.

Yes. This was more than enough.


	6. Chapter 6

**I couldn't sleep.**

I've been on the move ever since my transmigration, building upon my strengths and whittling away at my weaknesses, clawing for each and every hour with the concentrated mania of a man who intended to save the world. The Uzumaki have always possessed a certain vitality beyond the average shinobi, and I may as well be Uzumaki incarnate, but that doesn't mean I don't sleep. I need time to rest and recharge just like anyone else.

I've been subsisting on meditation up until now, determined to make my brief stints of relaxation at least somewhat productive. Meditation, and more chakra than a twelve year old has any right to. These factors combined have gotten me through weeks of exertion the likes of which my current body had never seen before, but they were not enough. Fatigue had rooted itself into my thoughts and actions, and it gained more ground on me with every passing day.

In hindsight, it might have been a better idea to sleep a little every day, rather than wait for my first mission to finally let myself go. A saner idea, anyway.

I had made my bed, though, so all I could really do was sleep in it for as long as Kakashi would let me before it was time to head out. Thankfully, a few hours would be enough to recover from the worst of the damage. It wasn't going to be fun, but I would manage.

Or rather, I would have managed if I had been able to actually fall asleep.

Sasuke was cool and soft and unbearably comfortable in my arms. Her slightly upturned nose twitched against my neck, where my naked skin met my hair, breathing in the scent of me. She exhaled it in a contented sigh. Or maybe she was just breathing. Between the exhaustion and crippling self-loathing, it was becoming sort of hard to tell.

I couldn't remember how long I had laid in the explicitly single sleeping bag, trying and failing to surrender myself to the fatigue, before I decided to roll over and see if my other side would have any luck. All I knew was that as soon as I did, Sasuke was suddenly burrowing into my arms. I had frozen, damn me for a fool, and by the time I came back to my senses she was already curled up against me.

And now... Now she was asleep, and I was not, and I couldn't bring myself to let go of her. My arms, if anything, had wrapped her up even tighter in the hours since she'd drifted off. Sasuke had a good few inches on me at this age, but curled up as she was, her legs tangled in mine and her face buried in my neck, she felt so small. I couldn't keep holding on to her, I had to let her go, she was thirteen and I _wasn't_ and this was _wrong-_

I clenched my teeth, biting back a snarl as furious, poisonous despair threatened to overwhelm me. My vision flashed a dark, bloody red as Kurama responded to my negative emotions, urging yet tainted chakra through my seal. A ridiculous sense of betrayal hit me in the same spot the fatigue and hopeless longing had been digging at for weeks, and I found myself hiding away in Sasuke's hair from the pain of it all.

I exhaled shakily into a sea of silken midnight strands, blocking out everything else and throwing my will against that of the bloody chakra frothing out from my seal. It was harder than I remembered, so much harder, because I no longer had nature on my side. And it hurt so much worse, because I no longer hated the entity behind it- I knew that Kurama wasn't the evil that I had thought him to be for so many years. Likewise, I knew that what he was doing now wasn't evil, nor was it a betrayal, as we had never been friends in this timeline.

It was just spiteful. And it hurt like a bitch.

Several excruciating seconds later, the last dregs of Kurama's chakra retreated behind my seal and I slumped back, having arched up when the first wave of chakra hit me. I passed a good long while laying there and feeling sorry for myself before I realized that I had taken Sasuke with me when I flopped back down. She was now sprawled across my chest, her hair pooling around the both of us, blissfully asleep.

I found my lips twitching into a fond little smile, my hand carefully moving from around her back to brush along the jagged black strands jutting out at the crown of her head. I've always loved Sasuke's hair.

It was unkempt, frenzied in a way that fit her perfectly. I firmly believed there was nothing softer in this world, but if you were to look at it you'd think it could cut glass. There were so many jagged spikes and edges, flaring up at the crown of her head and then cascading down her back in unruly black waves. In time, it would only become more unrestrained. She certainly wasn't going to waste time on something as trivial as maintaining her hair. I chuckled softly, threading a few strands through my fingers.

And then I realized what I was doing. I froze, hardly daring to breathe, and slowly pulled my hand away from her hair. Now I just had to remove the other arm from around her waist and get out of the tent, and maybe I'd finally get some sleep-

I wrapped my arm back around my teammate, and despaired. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't let go of the ghost of the woman I loved. And in this quiet, solitary moment, with nothing left to distract me, I couldn't convince myself that I wanted anything more than I wanted Uchiha Sasuke.

"You were wrong, Madara," I whispered, blinking rapidly against the burning in my eyes as memories of brokenhearted Uchiha women resurfaced in the darkness of the tent. It wasn't a chakra burn, this time. Just a few frustrated tears. "_I _don't deserve _her_."

So I held on to Sasuke for dear life. I resolved to rest, knowing as I did that I wouldn't sleep a wink. I wouldn't let myself, in the end- not when these precious few hours could be the last that I had to hold her like this, close, comfortable, right.

I didn't regret coming back, not really. But god help me if it wasn't lonely.

**esreveR nI nettirW**

Kawa no Kuni, the Land of Rivers, was an odd nation. As one of the Land of Fire's direct neighbors, Konoha got a respectable amount of work from their people on a fairly regular basis. I've been there more than once, for all sorts of reasons. Courier missions, escorts, and so on. I usually don't mind, either. It's a beautiful country.

It's not really the country's fault that my first two visits to it were such unmitigated clusterfucks.

The Land of Rivers was odd because it shared sizable borders with two nations home to Great Hidden Villages, Konoha and Suna respectively, but it dealt far more often with its third neighbor: Ame. This hadn't always been the case, and there were all kinds of theories as to why it had suddenly become so over a decade ago. I couldn't tell you what those theories were, because who cares, but I did know who the man behind the abrupt shift was.

Uzumaki Nagato. Or, as the rest of the world knew him, Pain. Ame's god king, Akatsuki's ruthless leader, and my cousin. Or my uncle, maybe. I never got the chance to ask.

Point being, after Pain brutally murdered Ame's previous leader and claimed the place as his own, he'd decided that he didn't like Ame's current allies and channels. So he made his own. I never found out exactly how deep his influence ran in the Land of Rivers, it hadn't seemed important at the time, but if nothing else he'd singlehandedly secured them as a primary trader as well as a host nation for at least half a dozen Akatsuki hideouts- I destroyed six. There could have been more, though.

I would have been impressed, if it weren't for the countless lives he'd taken in the process of forging the unofficial alliance. The Land of Rivers used to have a hidden village of its own- Tanigakure. It vanished around the same time its host country started favoring Ame, coincidentally diverting the bulk of its business to Pain's village in the process.

That wasn't all. There was more to Kawa no Kuzie's oddness than its unofficial puppet nation status, though maybe not quite so disturbing.

"Sensei," Sakura said, her voice wondering as she gazed out over the cliffside. "What are those?"

There were the caverns.

Surprisingly, the Land of Rivers had a lot of rivers. These rivers flowed, and unlike most of the channels we had in the Land of Fire, they flowed fierce. The end result of this, after countless centuries, was cliff faces worn away by water and time. Nature, both above and below ground, washed away by relentless currents. Caves hollowed out by the sea's prying freshwater fingers.

The Land of Rivers' most defining feature was its underground caverns, which was why I could never really like the place. The caverns were a symbol of nature overcome by the elements, and they were everywhere. They ran deeper than some of the rivers themselves, which ebbed and flowed with time.

Inevitably, Sasuke loved it for that very same reason.

Said kunoichi scoffed at Sakura's question. "They're caves," she said. Thankfully, the atmosphere of the place was already getting to her, so it didn't come out too venomous.

Sakura flushed a bit, anyway. "Well, I know that! But aren't they bigger than most caves?"

"They're pretty huge," I agreed. Sasuke paused in her retort, turning ever so slightly hooded eyes on me. Right, no talking. Damn it.

"They're one of the more famous natural phenomena around," Kakashi said, gesturing with his porn down below at a strong current of water rushing into the caverns. "The rivers here are strong, and over time they've carved out more than a few of those caverns. If you were to go down and follow that stream, you'd get a lot further than you might think."

Man, but I hoped that was the case.

We had reached something of a critical point after the last three days of travel. We hadn't been going particularly fast, since our client was a civilian not at all in his prime, but we'd covered ground nonetheless. The Land of Fire's borders had come and gone a few hours ago, giving way to rising landscapes with a more reasonable amount of trees. We'd been on an incline for a while now, which I guess was why the caves were so far below us.

"They're spectacular, aren't they?" Miura asked. "I know more than one adventurous soul whose travels have taken them beneath the surface of this country, and you wouldn't believe some of their stories!" The diminutive civilian gestured excitedly as he went off on a tangent that I vaguely remembered from before my transmigration. I tuned him out, scratching at an itch that had refused to go away for the past hour or so- a sign of conflicts to come, or maybe just Sasuke's eyes on the back of my head.

I wasn't sure how to treat our surprise client, given what little I knew of him. Really, my knowledge of who he was paled in comparison to my knowledge of what he would cause, which did not at all paint a good picture of him. So for now I've fallen back on neutrality, which for me boiled down to ignoring him like overdue rent.

He was taking it a lot better than Sasuke, who I'd decided to give myself some space from after my panic attack in her tent. This had led to more than a few uncomfortable moments as I did my best to be the silently disdainful presence to her that she always used to be to me, something which she clearly wasn't used to, and clearly didn't enjoy. At this point I was honestly counting the minutes before she lashed out and tried to kill me.

Fortunately for my nerves, if not my health, that was going to be a moot point soon enough.

"Hey Tatsuno," I said, an echo from six years past rolling off my tongue before I had time to really think about it. "We almost there?"

The seasoned chunin hummed, shifting a bit of his shoulder-length hair out of his eyes and peering down at the rivers below us in search of a familiar landmark. He found it a few seconds later. "At this pace, we have one more night before we reach the coast. From there, it should only take us a day of steady sailing to reach the capital."

I shivered, a thrill fluttering through my stomach at the familiar words. Almost there. Almost game time. "Are we going with you guys?"

"If possible," Tatsuno said, smiling ruefully to me. "I'll do my level best to have you credited for a B-rank mission as soon as we return home. We owe you a lot."

"Mah, there's no need for that much flattery," Kakashi said before I could wave the man off myself. "I'm sure my cute little students are more than happy with the C-rank pay they were promised. Isn't that right, you three?" He quirked his eye in a happy crescent, challenging any of us to disagree. I got halfway through a snappy retort, and then I froze.

A change had come over our sensei, a subtle but unmistakeable tension in his bearing that had my blood pumping furiously as adrenaline surged through me. Sasuke noticed it, too, her stance shifting just so, putting the hilt of her chokuto within easy reach.

"Formation," he said simply. I shifted a step to the right at the same moment that Sasuke shifted to the left, bringing us closer together in front of Miura, who came to a startled halt a step behind us. Sakura blinked, looking between us and our sensei, before the sudden tension in the air hit her and she hurried behind us, taking her place behind the client.

"Hatake-san," Tatsuno said lowly, stepping up beside the deceptively relaxed jonin. "I don't sense anything."

"Give it a moment."

I felt it a scant handful of seconds before the chunin did, and the intensity of it sent another little shiver through me. It had been so long, I'd forgotten what it felt like. That relentless, suffocating pressure, assuring me that my seconds were numbered, and that the hour glass of my life would be running out of sand very, very soon.

Gaara's killing intent washed over us like a physical thing, throwing Miura to the ground as his legs gave out beneath him and even forcing our chunin companion a startled step back. Sakura gasped, tremors wracking her slim frame as Gaara's desire to utterly destroy us washed over her again and again.

I snapped two clones into being, each of which took up vigil on either side of Sakura. She flinched as they grabbed her hands, but they held firm, and after a moment the worst of the tremors faded. She sighed shakily, wresting control from the murderous assault.

She looked to me, relief and confusion and maybe even gratitude warring for dominance in her eyes. I flashed her a smile while my clones squeezed her hands in reassurance. "We'll be fine, Sakura."

"They're here," Sasuke said, eyes narrowed.

The siblings were the first to appear from the forest laid out just under a mile in front of us. Temari burst out into the open air atop her fan, flying across the open plain between us and the forest on a gale of controlled wind. Kankuro came next, darting out of the trees and rushing behind his sister.

And then something within the forest lurched, and sand came gushing out of the trees as plentiful and furious as the rivers at the bottom of the cliff side. I winced, watching it tear some of the smaller trees from their roots entirely. It swarmed across the field, contorting and lashing out at random intervals towards Temari and Kankuro, who remained a few precious steps ahead of it until they came to an abrupt stop a scant ten yards from us.

The waves of sand consumed them, and then parted as quickly as they had appeared, shaking with Gaara's restrained urge to kill as they flowed back to their master.

In their wake stood the Kazekage's children and sensei, regarding us with varying degrees of professional detachment. Temari dashed a few stray grains of sand from her person with a deft flip of her dark blonde hair, crossing her arms over her light lavender battle dress and surveying us coolly. Kankuro hunkered down into a crouch, sneering at us from beneath the hood of his black cat suit. Their sensei, a man I vaguely remembered to be called Baki, grimly met Kakashi's one-eyed stare with his own beneath the cloth half-veil that seemed to round out most traditional Suna uniforms.

And Gaara- well. He sort of stood there killing us with his eyes, being generally insane.

"Here we go," I muttered, clenching and unclenching my fists sporadically. My fellow jinchuriki's murderous jade gaze snapped to me, and I felt my lips part in a wild grin. Just you wait, Gaara. Things are about to change.

"Hatake Kakashi," Baki said, breaking the tense silence that had heralded their arrival. "You are in possession of an enemy of the state. As friends of Suna, we ask that you surrender Miura Akira immediately."

Tatsuno jerked, outrage coloring his features, but Kakashi stilled him with a raised hand. "Greetings, Baki," he said lightly, and the jonin from Suna inclined his head in solemn greeting. "May we see some proof of Miura-san's guilt?"

"H-hatake-san!" Miura gasped from his place on the ground, looking fearfully between Gaara and our sensei. Kakashi politely ignored him.

"We have only our orders from the Kazekage," Baki said, pulling a small scroll from his flak jacket, ringed with a vibrant blue band and emblazoned with the Kazekage's seal. He tossed it to Kakashi, who caught and unfurled it with one smooth snap of his wrist. His lone eye flitted over the contents, and he sighed.

"Well, this is awkward," he said, gesturing for Tatsuno to hand over his own mission scroll. He tossed both of them back to Baki, who read through the scarlet-ringed Konoha scroll with similar haste. "We're duty-bound to deliver Miura-san to the capital, alive if possible."

"The terms of our alliance-"

"Were never officially agreed upon," Kakashi smoothly interjected. "I don't suppose you'd like to accompany us to the capital, and proceed from there?"

"Unacceptable," was Baki's immediate reply.

"We've reached an impasse, then," I said gravely, a bare second before Kakashi could. He raised an eyebrow at me, but I was too hyped up to respond. I found myself bouncing from foot to foot. "So, which one of you is getting it first?"

There was really no point in asking. I knew damn well who was getting it first, and he was currently shaking with the urge to splatter me across the plains.

"Can I kill him?" Gaara asked, though it wasn't clear who or what he was asking. Baki scowled.

"I won't ask a third time," the jonin from Suna said, a subtle note of urgency in his tone. "Give us the noble, Hatake."

"Mah, mah, let's not get hasty," Kakashi said. "I'm sure we can come to some sort of agreement here-"

"I'm going to kill him," Gaara whispered, flashing his teeth at me in a chilling smile. I returned it happily.

Sasuke hissed and darted sideways, crashing into my side and sending us both sprawling as a tendril of sand Gaara had been slowly feeding through the grass whipped out at my heart. I wrapped her up in my arms and turned our rolling tumble into a backwards somersault, coming to my feet with a flourish and letting her go to cross my fingers in a simple little seal.

"_Taijuu Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!_"

And I flooded the plains with more clones than Gaara had grains of sand.

Kakashi shook his head exasperatedly. "You children." He blurred across the plains in the next moment, clashing with Baki in a ferocious round of steel against steel. I dove into the roiling mass of clones, my heart pounding a furious beat against my chest as I darted between bright orange cloth and grasping sand. This was it. Finally, _finally_, I could set the first stage of my plan into motion. Starting right now, I was going to save the world.

Eat your heart out, Pain. This one was going to _work_.

* * *

><p><strong>It was finally time.<strong> Finally, _finally_, I could let go.

My chokuto came free of its sheath with a crackling scream, lightning surging frenziedly down the blade's edge. I sighed, a long, satisfied motion. I blinked, and in the split second of darkness my vision sharpened into sudden clarity, my immature sharingan pooling to crimson life in my eyes. I surveyed the orgy of orange shinobi that Naruto had dropped on the field, picking out my first target amidst the chaos- the eldest daughter with the ridiculous quadruple ponytail. My lips curled.

"Sasuke!" Sakura cried. "We're supposed to defend the client!"

I flicked my empty hand at the chunin tagalong, who seemed conflicted as to whether he should join the fray or hang back with the client.

"It's his client. He can guard with you," I said, making the decision for him. Then I leapt up onto the nearest clone's shoulders, crouching and pushing off before it could acclimate itself to my weight, dispelling it in a flash.

Naruto had made far too many clones, really. There were hundreds of them, and after a certain number in a condensed area they stopped being useful fighters and started being obnoxious distractions. A decent tactic in its own right, which Naruto had infuriated me with more than once before I got good enough at navigating through their ranks that it didn't matter. Something told me this Naruto wasn't quite on that level of thinking yet, though.

It made for good traction, if nothing else. I flew up the literal mountains of clones piled one atop the other, dispelling over a dozen that I used as stepping stones on my way to the sky. My chokuto chirped wildly all the while- it wasn't on the level of my _chidorigatana_, not yet, but it would do.

I burst into open air directly below the eldest daughter- Temari, I think it was- and lashed out with a simple cut at the paper of the fan she had taken flight with. It was the chirruping of my blade that gave me away, allowing the other kunoichi a precious moment to jerk the heavy metal of the fan into my path.

My blade sheared through the thickly plated steel as easily as I would have cut through the paper, cutting a furrow clean through the metal. Temari hissed something poisonous at me and glided out of my range, gripping the base of her battle fan tightly.

I was just beginning to fall when she pulled the fan out from under her, twisted in mid air, and swiped it down at me with a shout of effort. Gale force winds came howling from its edges straight at me, and I flashed through six quick seals.

_Katon: Hosenka no Jutsu!_

I spat out seven balls of fire as wide around as I was tall, one after the other, and as each of them crashed into the nameless wind jutsu it lost more and more of its momentum. The final fireball crashed into the thrashing mass of fire and tore control from the wind, sailing back at the Suna kunoichi under my careful guidance. Temari quickly swung her fan beneath her again and propelled herself sharply away from the flames.

I fell back into the mass of clones, which had grown noticeably smaller since my ascent. Gaara was making quick work of things, then. I twisted at the waist as a whipping lance of sand came tearing through the clones towards me, severing it and dashing the severed pieces to the wind with a lash of my lightning-covered blade. I righted myself atop the shoulders of another clone and took off towards the outskirts of the fight, where I had seen the middle sibling skulking around while in open air.

Gaara snarled somewhere down below in mounting frustration, to my amusement. It seemed Naruto's clones were driving his opponent over the edge faster than they were being destroyed.

The middle sibling with the makeup, Kankuro, was hanging back at the edge of the fight. The fingers of his right hand weaved in complex motions, directing his puppet with shining strings of chakra in an effort to get it through the chaos of Naruto and Gaara's fight and make a play on the client. So engrossed was he in the delicate chakra technique, he noticed the chirping of my blade a moment later than his sister had, and in that moment was cost a clean retreat.

I struck out strong and true, and my chokuto cut from the base of the Suna nin's palm to the tip of his middle finger, parting flesh to the bone and numbing muscles with lightning. His hand went limp as my chakra worked its way down his arm, and in the same moment his puppet clattered to the ground in a pile of metal weaponry and wooden parts halfway across the field. He bellowed a curse, shaking his arm wildly in a vain attempt to dispel my lingering chakra.

I smirked, reversing my grip on my blade and rushing in to capitalize on the distraction.

A scant few seconds later I turned away, flicking scarlet blood from my crackling blade and assessing the field. Kankuro lay crumpled and bloody behind me, his chest shuddering with the effort to breathe past the paralysis I had driven into his each of his limbs and various non-lethal points on his torso.

Time would tell if he could overcome the paralysis and bleeding, but I wouldn't be the one to do the final deed. Gaara had been one of Naruto's closest friends, and would be again of the blond fool had anything to say about it, and I wouldn't complicate that by murdering one of the littlest jinchuriki's siblings. Not directly, anyway.

I formed the seal for the body flicker around the hilt of my chokuto and sped back into the mass of clone and sand that was rapidly becoming more sand than clone, ascending the destabilizing tiers of clones and questing for another glimpse of Temari. I caught a flash of her fan as it swept by and adjusted my pace accordingly. A furious scream from down below caught my attention just before I kicked off into open air, and I paused precariously on the shoulders of an indignant clone as a thundering impact of sand against earth shook the tower of orange beneath me.

"Why won't you _bleed!?_" Gaara raged, throwing his arms to and fro like a psychotic maestro directing a bloody concerto. His sand leapt to his beck and call, ripping through clones with increasingly creative forms. Snapping jaws, wickedly sharp claws, and clones of his own that somehow looked even more insane than he did- though who was I to talk, really?- tore through Naruto's clones at a breakneck pace, making my footing even more treacherous.

Not a single one, however, turned up anything but chakra smoke. That same breathy sound from weeks ago bubbled up to my lips, and I launched myself into the sky. My chokuto went silent for a single frozen moment, and I cast a lazy glance around to make sure everything was as it should be. Sakura, Tatsuno, and the client were in the same place they had been a minute ago, and Kakashi and Baki were flashing in and out of view some distance away, bouts of lightning and wind and vicious hand to hand tearing up the area around them and tearing through any clones that happened to get too close.

I nodded to myself, satisfied with the state of the field. Then I slammed into Temari's blind spot with punishing force.

The physically older kunoichi gasped and reached for the base of her fan, sending chakra spiralling along its edges that shimmered a vibrant teal to the tomoe spinning in my eyes. Too little too late. I lashed an arm around her throat, jerking her hand from the fan, and urged lightning to flow along my blade again as I stabbed down at the sail bearing us up.

I swung cleanly, parting a razor thin line in the fan's paper, which the winds that had been keeping us afloat promptly blew wide open. Temari's fan lurched beneath us, plummeting towards the open maw of clones and sand waiting below us. Temari struggled desperately against my grip on her neck, arching her back in a vain effort to get away.

With nothing left to do, she yanked a kunai from the thick red sash wrapped around her waist and stabbed it at my arm. I struck it from her hand with a contemptuous swipe of my chokuto, clucking in her ear. "Now, now, I don't like you quite like that." She sputtered something incredibly insulting against my chokehold, and I frowned, offended.

"That wasn't very nice."

"_Fuck you_," Temari hissed through clenched teeth.

I threw her off the fan.

The Suna kunoichi took a deep breath and screamed all sorts of sulfuric things at me while I carefully piloted her mangled fan away. The sand swallowed her up, cutting her off mid-insult to my cup size, and I woefully turned away from her plight. It was out of my hands now. If her murderous younger brother just so happened to wring the blood from her still beating heart in the confusion of the fight, there wasn't exactly anything I could do about it, was there?

I urged Temari's tattered fan past the writhing mass of sand with an application of wind chakra that took far more concentration than I'd like to admit- indeed, it would have been utterly impossible for me just a few weeks ago. Still, I managed, steering well clear of the deceptively quiet war being waged between the two teams' jonin sensei, who were about as close to an even match as the last time. Kakashi had the advantage, from what I could see, but it wasn't nearly definitive enough to put Baki down.

"_Yes!_" Gaara's voice sounded down below, followed by a panicked shout as he drove a single orange-clad shinobi to his knees with a wickedly barbed tendril of sand.

"Naruto!" Sakura shouted from across the plains, and I threw Temari's fan into a dive. It was time for the second stage of the fight. Time for the _real _challenge.

I leapt from the fan a good two dozen at eye level with the distant treetops, throwing myself into a spin and forcing as much vibrant blue lightning through my chokuto as my coils could manage. The sand I struck parted like warm butter beneath my blade, and the resulting shockwave of condensed lightning blasted the severed half of the strand away from my blond fool. A _chidori nagashi _without the chidori.

"Sasuke?" Naruto said, baffled. "When did you learn lightning transformation?"

I smirked. "When did you learn what lightning transformation was, dead last?"

"What are you doing? He's mine!" Gaara snarled, swinging his arm as if to backhand me from a dozen yards away. His sand was only too happy to oblige, but I dashed it to useless grains with another short discharge. I forced my excitement down, steadying my breathing, and shored up what little chakra I had left.

My chakra reserves were truly pitiful at this age, even more so than I remembered. As I was now I would only be able to manage two, maybe three uses of the chidori, which was why I had stuck to basic lightning manipulation thus far. It would have to be enough, for now.

"No," I said. "No, littlest jinchuriki, he is _mine_."

Always and forever mine, and I wouldn't let anyone else have him. Not again. Never again.

"Oh," Naruto breathed. "_Oh_."

"Don't move," I told him. "I can't afford to keep track of you." This next part would take all the concentration and chakra I had left, no doubt. I needed to incapacitate him without killing him or knocking him unconscious and unleashing the Ichibi. I also needed to avoid the worst of his sand, lest it ruin me like it did before.

"Enough," Gaara snapped, clutching his head with one hand and waving the other sharply. "Mother wants blood. She'll have you _both_." I tensed, tomoe spinning fiercely in my eyes, and brought my hands together in the seal for the body flicker-

And stilled as a firm hand clamped down on my wrist. I looked down at lightly tanned fingers with some confusion, struggling to reconcile this interruption with my memories and failing. I lashed out with my chokuto and threw back another wave of sand almost as an afterthought, looking back at Naruto incredulously.

"What are you doing?"

He didn't respond for a moment, just staring back at me in shock. "You've already got the sharingan," he said. "How did I not see-?" He cut himself off, letting go of my wrist and hiding his face in his hand, laughing helplessly.

"_Naruto_. Why did you stop me?"

He shook his head, still laughing, and pointed past me, over Gaara's shoulder.

"Step one."

I opened my mouth to snap at him, but the words died in my throat as the familiar sound of chakra grinding against chakra hit me. I spun, following the _clone's _pointed finger to the roiling wall of sand sitting in Gaara's blind spot. That wasn't possible. He didn't know that yet. He _couldn't _know that yet. And yet, the wall of sand trembled and gave way to a sphere of chakra light that glowed like the sun to my eyes.

Rasengan.

Gaara twisted around, eye's flying wide open as his ultimate defense broke beneath the might of the Yondaime Hokage's ultimate creation. Naruto hurtled through the gap, rasengan drawn back like a javelin in his hand. The tomoe in my eyes spun frenziedly, searching his face, his bearing, his everything for a sign to suggest that he was the twelve year old he appeared to be, searching for an explanation as to how he knew a jutsu that he couldn't possibly know-

"Be my friend, motherfucker!" Naruto howled, slamming the rasengan into Gaara's face. My heart skipped a beat.

That was _my _Naruto.

The littlest jinchuriki screamed in sudden, bloodcurdling agony as the rasengan tore through his final layer of armor and into the side of his head. He clenched his fist desperately, his sand belatedly surging up to meet the first shinobi to ever hurt him- twice, now- and crush him. But before it could, the rasengan detonated with a thunderclap of sound and light.

"Gaara!" Temari cried out from somewhere behind me, having apparently made it out of her brother's sand unscathed. She tried to run past me, towards her brother, but faltered and fell to her knees. Perhaps not entirely unscathed.

Said brother, the cause of her distress, was thrown into and _through _his absolute defense by the rasengan's final discharge. He tumbled bonelessly across the grassy plain, his face a bloody mess, and my eyes widened as I realized exactly where Naruto had sent him sprawling- towards the edge of the cliff.

Gaara's sand surged across the field in pursuit of him, and when it became clear that wouldn't be enough his armor detached itself from his body and dug into the ground. The speed of his tumble slowed, but not enough to save him. The littlest jinchuriki went over the edge with momentum to spare. The last thing I saw of him was a single murderous jade eye, the other obscured by a bloody hand, and then he was gone.

Naruto straightened up from the crouch he'd fallen into, and my heart skipped another beat. This was- This couldn't be what I thought it was. The Sage never said he'd come back with me. He _couldn't _have come back with me. He _died_. I saw it.

Naruto ran a hand through his hair, turning to meet my eyes with a wry little smile. I shivered, my chokuto falling from suddenly numb fingers.

"So," he said, his voice clear and steady in the following silence, and why couldn't I remember him talking like that the first time around? "How was th-"

He grunted, legs suddenly flying out from underneath him, lashed together by a single cord of sand. I sprinted forward, my heart flying into my throat.

The lone, near invisible strand whipped him across the ground, pulling him unerringly to the same edge its master had just gone over. Naruto flipped onto his stomach, digging his hands into the dirt and kicking frantically at the sand around his legs. It only looped tighter around him in response, and why was he _so far away?_

I blurred forward in a body flicker, but he was already over the edge, out of my sight. I blinked and the world shifted around me, sharpening into a clarity beyond what it had been a moment ago. Everything moved a fraction slower than it had before, giving me an excruciatingly detailed view of everything except Naruto.

I skidded to a stop at the edge of the cliff, my blood roaring in my ears, and cried out desperately to the love of my life.

"_ASURA!_"

Somewhere behind me the decoy clone burst into chakra smoke, and Naruto twisted around in mid air as he fell, disbelief and jubilation in his wonderful, beautiful blue eyes as my voice and his clone's memories hit him. Then his lips parted in a fierce smile, and the world blurred as tears sprang to my eyes.

"_Indra!_" He shouted, whipping his middle and index fingers up to his headband in a salute. "I'll meet you there!"

And then from down below came a monstrous hand as tall and wide around as the Hokage Tower, made entirely of sand, reaching up to him. Naruto shot me a wink, his eyes _alive _in a way they hadn't been for years. That same breathless sound came rushing up my throat, but different, stronger. I laughed for the first time in I don't know how long, falling to my knees as the relief shook the world out from under me.

Then the titanic hand closed around him, swallowing him up and dragging him down to the caverns with the Ichibi.


	7. Chapter 7

"It's you, isn't it?"

Naruto looked hazily up at Madara. Her legendary eyes, products of decades of systematic Uzumaki genocide, were locked on his own with unnerving intensity. Straddling him as she was, her unreasonably long hair pooled around his head and cut off everything but her own shadowed features and vibrant purple eyes. It was an eerie effect.

"Who's me?" he asked. He pursed his lips. That hadn't made much sense. Why did everything feel so fuzzy?

"Don't play dumb," she hissed, leaning in closer. Naruto idly considered leaning up and bumping their noses. She had a cute nose, he thought, especially when it wasn't all crinkled up by a sneer.

"I can see it," she said, flickering from his eyes to his lips to the curve of his jaw, drinking it all in ravenously. "With these eyes, I can finally see. That chakra, the way it clings to you. I _see._"

"Chakra," Naruto whispered. That was right. He needed chakra. Kurama?

**"We're out," **Kurama rumbled, the words reverberating in his head and clearing up a bit of the fog. **"You blew it all protecting the weaklings. It'll take me a minute to gather more. Stall."** The words came out short, clipped. Kurama was nervous. Naruto bit his lip sharply, focusing on the pain and gathering his wits about it.

"Whose chakra?" he asked.

"His chakra." Madara quivered, and Naruto let loose a strangled gasp at the sudden agony the motion elicited. He looked down, away from her eyes, and found her war fan sticking out of his chest.

Ah, right. That's why he was on his back.

**"That will also take time." **Thank you, Kurama.

"I should have realized it sooner," She said, reaching out and brushing a few locks of hair from his forehead, revealing the symbol beneath. "It was right in front of me for years, but I never realized. I didn't _want _to realize." She laughed, and its bitterness made it no less pleasant a sound. She was a lot like Sasuke in that way.

"To think you'd be an Uzumaki..." She shook her head, hair brushing lightly against his cheeks. "It's just too cruel."

"I don't understand," Naruto admitted. Madara blinked, looking back at him as if registering his presence for the first time. The concentric circles surrounding her pupils spun hypnotically, luring him back into the fog.

"It's you, isn't it?" She whispered again, tracing a finger against the scars on his cheek. He shivered. "Hashirama..."

"What?" Naruto asked, wide eyed. "No. That's not-"

"Liar. I can see it. The same chakra that connected me to him, now it connects you to _her_." The last word was spit like a foul curse, and Naruto grunted as the Uchiha matriarch leaned further into him, forcing her fan an inch deeper in his chest.

"My descendant, Uchiha Sasuke," Madara said, her full red lips twisting in a scowl. "The most infamous nukenin Konoha has ever seen since myself. And _you_, Uzumaki Naruto, the most celebrated hero of Konoha since Hashirama. Her eyes have the same power mine did, and you know just how similar you are to him. We were almost the same, the four of us.

"But he chose Konoha, and you chose her." She blinked once, twice, and Naruto forgot how to breathe. She was holding back tears. She was about to _cry_. "Why did you choose her, when he didn't choose me?"

"Madara..." The woman shivered at his voice, sending another lance of pain through his chest, but he pushed it aside. "I didn't- you're wrong. I didn't choose her over Konoha," he said, softly. "I chose both."

"Why!?" she demanded, her low, smoky voice cracking around the word. "Why her, and not me? What does she have that I don't? I'm stronger, faster, better in every way. I'm-" Her voice broke, and Naruto inhaled sharply as a tear hit his cheek. "I'm more of a woman, aren't I?"

"Madara," he said again, struggling for words. He hadn't expected this. He hadn't expected these kinds of fears, these insecurities.

She saved him the effort by leaning down and mashing her lips against his.

Naruto jerked, flinching away from the pain of the movement and the lips of the woman who was doing her level best to end the world. She forced her tongue past his lips, warm and eager, but he avoided its touch. He pulled away as far as he could, which wasn't very far, making protesting noises all the while. She finally relented, her crimson breast plate heaving as she leaned back.

"You kiss like him, too." She whispered. God, why did she look so much like Sasuke?

"I'm not Hashirama, and Sasuke isn't you," he said. "We made different choices, led different lives. It's in the past now. This whole thing, this _plan_, isn't going to change that." Naruto forced his body to move, to reach up and cup a porcelain white cheek in his hand. She leaned into his palm, gripping it tightly in her own.

"Move on, Madara," he implored.

Her hand tightened around his, breaking it with a sharp crack. He winced.

"Never," Madara hissed, the ground trembling beneath them with the force of her rage. "First I lost him to _that woman_, and now I've lost you to _myself?_ I won't allow it. I'll never allow it!"

Someone screamed in fury, far away, and Madara leapt off of him just in time to avoid a bolt of ravenous black flames. The arrow speared a hole in the earth over a foot around in diameter, and was followed a moment later by another.

"Get _away _from him!" Sasuke shrieked, hurtling from the sky on susanoo's flaming wings.

Madara snarled, swiping the tears from her cheeks and tearing the fan from his chest with one sharp jerk.

**"What!? No! _No!_" **Kurama howled, and Naruto arched up as a sensation he'd only ever felt once before ripped through him in the fan's wake. **"Naruto! You have to hang on! DON'T LET-"**

Kurama's voice vanished from his mind, and everything became very, very quiet.

Naruto blinked slowly, staring up at the midnight sky. A silhouette came and went above him, a towering figure that he knew was familiar but couldn't quite place. He breathed, chest rising, falling, rising... falling...

A tremor in the earth alerted him to someone else joining him on the ground, followed soon after by a frantic young woman's face appearing above him. She screamed something at him, the stars in her blood red eyes spinning wildly, but all he could hear was the quiet beat of his own heart. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba... dum...

She was beautiful. Even as she screamed and shook him and started to cry, she was nothing short of stunning- and that meant she had to be Sasuke. The name pierced the haze that Kurama had left in his head, and with it came a rush of fierce affection. Naruto smiled, reaching up and covering one of her hands with his own, leaden fingers struggling to intertwine themselves with hers.

"Sa..." he rasped, throat faltering at the first syllable for some incomprehensible reason. Why did he feel so tired? Where was Kurama?

Sasuke threaded her fingers through his- the broken ones, though they didn't hurt all that much anymore- and kept screaming at him, as if his sudden deafness was a wall she could break down with enough effort. Naruto shook his head, hoping she'd stop before she wore her voice out.

"Love... you." She never talked about her feelings, especially regarding "them", and he knew she hated it when he talked about his own, but it felt right to say. He squeezed her hand as best he could with his numb, broken fingers, and closed his eyes.

And so, Uzumaki Naruto quietly died.

* * *

><p>"Ah, you're awake."<p>

Naruto blinked, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at his unmarred torso. That was fast. Then he looked up at the old man floating placidly in front of him, the only other presence in the vast expanse of pure white energies he'd been taken to.

"... Kurama?"

He smiled, all three eyes crinkling. "Not as such. I'd be closer to his father."

Naruto's brow furrowed. "Bijuu have parents?" The answer hit him a moment later, information gathered from gloating, meditation, and harried mid-battle briefings coalescing into the form of the man who had split the nine bijuu with the eyes of a god. He jabbed a finger at the three-eyed man floating in mid-air.

"You're the sage!"

The Rikudou Sennin nodded, his silvery white hair swaying above his head, brushing against a short pair of horns. "And you are Uzumaki Naruto."

Naruto pushed himself to his feet, scrubbing his eyes. When he opened them again, the sage was still there. "Aren't you dead?"

"Aren't you?"

"I-" He paused, touching his chest. He'd recovered from worse before, hadn't he? But why couldn't he remember what had brought him here? Everything was so fuzzy... "I don't know."

"Allow me to refresh your memory," the sage said, not unkindly. "Uchiha Madara pinned you to the earth with her war fan while you were distracted by the Gedo Mazo, and when Uchiha Sasuke drove her away she took Kurama with her. The shock of losing his chakra after joining it so completely with your own, coupled with your injury, stopped your heart."

Naruto stared.

"_What?_"

"Sasuke is engaging her now," the sage informed him. "Without you to assist her, she won't last long. A minute, perhaps two. Then she will join us in death."

No. _No_. "Help me," Naruto blurted. The sage raised an eyebrow. "She can't die, not now. We have too much to lose if Madara wins, and she- she _can't die_. Please!"

The sage considered him, six orbs of chakra so dense that they screamed to Naruto's senses rotating slowly behind him. Finally, he asked, "What do you know of my children, Naruto?"

"Your children?" Naruto bit his lip, thinking hard. "There were... two. They were strong. They..." He trailed off, clenching his eyes shut and willing himself to remember. Sasuke was dying, and he couldn't _remember-_

"Their names were Indra and Asura," the sage said, snapping him from his rising panic. "My daughter and son, respectively, and both very strong, yes." His wrinkled lips quirked wryly.

"Indra was like your Sasuke in many ways. Deeply emotional beneath the surface, and more selfish than she had any right to be. She inherited my spiritual energies, including a variation of my eyes that you're no doubt familiar with."

"Sharingan," Naruto muttered with something like disgust. The sage chuckled.

"Indeed. She was a natural born genius, exceeding even the lofty expectations the world had of her as my eldest child. She outgrew my teachings before she was your age and struck out for greater power, power that I possessed but could not grant her." He sighed, ruefully continuing, "People worshiped her every bit as faithfully as they worshiped myself.

"Asura was... different. A fool, in every sense of the word. He inherited my physical energies, an incredible vitality of chakra, but he had no control over them. He was brash, headstrong, and regularly outperformed by the people I taught. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't match his sister. A dead last."

Naruto frowned, connecting the dots, and the sage inclined his head in confirmation.

"He was much like you, when you were a child. And just like you, he grew in a way nobody expected, least of all his older sister." The sage flicked a hand, and the orbs of chakra surrounding him whirled between the two of them, five orbs dancing around one.

"While Indra wholeheartedly embraced her role as my heir apparent, conducting herself as a clear superior to those who followed her, Asura refused to lord his parentage over even the lowliest man. He befriended men, women, and children through sheer force of personality, working diligently all the while to realize the full potential of the chakra I'd given him."

The sage chuckled softly. "I think even he was surprised when he did."

"Sir," Naruto said, voice strained. "I appreciate you telling me about your kids." And he did. "But is this going to save Sasuke?"

The sage crossed his arms, regarding him thoughtfully. "You know, I would have expected you to ask about saving yourself first."

"I'm already dead," Naruto pointed out. "And even if I had to choose, well." He sighed, rubbing his neck. "I'd rather she make it than me."

The Rikudou Sennin blinked, honestly surprised. "So that's why."

"Huh?"

The sage flicked his hand again, and this time the thin staff that had been floating behind him whirled around into his grasp. "Uzumaki Naruto," he said, gravity weighing the words down. His rinnegan bore into Naruto.

"With my eyes, I can clearly see... Asura's chakra clinging tightly to you."

"His..." Naruto's eyes widened. "How?"

"Exactly how I have come to you hear, now." The sage gestured to the expanse of pure white energies. "A process that sent his chakra, body and soul, journeying through time and space in search of a worthy heir. Transmigration."

The surface Naruto was standing on rippled like water, and in its reflection he found a man staring back up at him.

"Asura," he murmured, and the reflection bowed its head. "But why come back? And why me?"

"As I was saying," The sage said, amused. "Asura came into his own when he was a bit older than you, and when he did he had an even more devoted following than Indra, because every one of his followers had been a friend before he rose to power. He was powerful in his own way, and fiercely devoted to peace. Not because I desired peace, but because he desired it for himself and all of his precious friends.

"So when the time came for me to pass on my waning energies and dreams of peace, I passed them not to Indra, as the world had expected, but to Asura." He sighed. "She did not take it well.

"Indra, who had looked down upon her brother her whole life, could not accept that I had chosen him as my heir instead of her. She challenged his right to be the heir to my peace, discarding my peace in the same motion by waging war against her own brother. She had never felt failure before then, and her pride could not accept the blow. And then... there were her feelings for him."

"Wait, you mean _feelings?_" Naruto asked, baffled. The Rikudou Sennin nodded gravely.

"Indra had very high standards, in all aspects of her life. Looking back on it now, I believe part of the reason she was so disappointed in Asura's inadequacy was that she wanted him to be her partner." Noticing Naruto's horrified look, he shrugged. "It was difficult for both of them. Aside from each other, there was no one they could truly relate to. It was impossible to escape the awe and care they were handled with as my children, except with each other.

"When Asura finally reached his full potential, Indra realized that he'd been everything she'd wanted all along- she simply hadn't been patient enough to let him show it. Asura had harbored similar feelings for his sister, for similar reasons, but by the time they might have been able to share them I had already passed, and they were forced to choose between their love and my dream."

The sage spun his staff slowly, the wrinkles in his face deepening to match his sorrow. "They chose my dream, and it haunts them to this day."

"Then Asura is doing this because he's..." Naruto trailed off, taking in the sorrowful expression of his reflection as it watched its father. "Guilty?"

"Guilty," the sage acknowledged. "My children's war broke the fragile peace that my own sibling and I built before our deaths, and it hasn't recovered since. That kind of failure burns even the dead. Asura hasn't rested a single day since then, restlessly traversing time and space in search of a better heir to my will than himself.

"Indra is much the same."

Naruto inhaled sharply. "Her too?" His reflection, Asura's reflection, nodded once. "Then where is she?"

"Uchiha Sasuke," the sage said. Naruto jerked back from the words, struggling to fit this new world-shaking bit of information in with the rest. "And before her, Uchiha Madara."

"Great," Naruto said. And then the Uchiha Matriarch's final words to him finally came together. "Oh, _great!_ It was the Shodai before me, wasn't it?"

Father and son nodded in solemn reply.

"Great! Perfect! So not only is it incest, but she's a double nukenin, too! No wonder Sasuke's out of her mind with that kind of legacy!" Naruto threw his hands up to the not-sky, entreating anyone for a bit of sanity in this fever dream he was no doubt having when he should be up and fighting to save the world. Unfortunately, there was only one deific being around, and he didn't seem all that inclined to help.

"So then what's the point of all this?" Naruto continued, pacing back and forth to work off some energy, until he noticed Asura's reflection following him step for step and stopped in his tracks. "The Shodai and Madara didn't do any better than your children, even with their souls along for the ride, whatever that even does-"

"They created your village."

"And then Madara wiped my family out!" Naruto snapped. "Is that really an improvement?"

"Perhaps not," the sage murmured.

"Right! They didn't work, whoever Asura and Indra transmigrated to before that obviously didn't work, and now they've chosen me and Sasuke. But what is the _difference?_ What has Asura given me that I wouldn't have gotten myself?"

"Nothing," the sage said. "Yet."

"Exactly-" The last Uzumaki's teeth snapped together with sharp click. "... Yet?"

"Yes." The sage spun his staff in one hand, skimming the surface that Naruto was standing on and dispersing Asura's reflection. Naruto was a bit relieved to see the man go. "There is incredible power in the souls of my children. Power beyond modern ninjutsu, forged by years of toil and war. True ninshu. Yet they have not once shared their power with another. Not even their chosen hosts. Do you know why?"

Naruto shook his head.

"All this time, through all these centuries, they have been looking for better heirs than themselves." The Rikudou Sennin locked eyes with Naruto, and the full weight of his presence struck Naruto nearly off his feet, a _true _heavenly subjugation of what could only be an omnipresent god.

"My children could not handle their own power. They did not have the strength, the absolute confidence in themselves necessary to control it. They inherited my body and soul without truly earning them, and so they were overwhelmed. They chose the wrong goals to throw their lives away pursuing, and only in death did they understand this.

"They could not complete their journeys, and so they died fools." He smiled, and the third eye in his forehead glowed with expertly restrained strength. "But you're different. Unlike the previous predecessors, you've got this strange bit of _ foolishness_ to you... And that has given birth to this different possibility."

The Rikudou Sennin held a thin, weathered hand out, and above his palm the six spheres of chakra gathered. They whirled and danced around each other, growing closer and closer until they all struck each other at once, shivering and melting into a single mass of hyper dense chakra.

In the shape of a... deck of cards?

"Tell me, Uzumaki Naruto. What do you know of the arcana?"

* * *

><p><strong>"Nobody makes me bleed my own blood," Gaara snarled, somewhere deep within the sands.<strong> "_Nobody!_"

"You've got the wrong nobody!" I called back, grinning wildly as I raced through thrashing tendrils and waves of chakra-laden sand. "My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and you're gonna remember it for the rest of your life!"

I broke through the latest rush, appearing squarely in my fellow jinchuriki's blind spot, and slammed a handful of spiral energy into the wall that his automatic defense threw up at the last second. Two clones dove through the gap and tackled Gaara clear off his feet while another two did the same to me, saving me from a vengeful spear of sand that lurched up from the veritable sea of grains beneath me.

I landed within spitting distance of my opponent, turning my assisted dodge into a somersault and hopping up to avoid another flurry of sand-based projectiles.

"Nice!" Clone on the left whooped, smacking clone on the right's raised hand. I ducked a stray whip and continued forward, but Naruto left and right were caught mid high five and neatly decapitated. I rolled my eyes and created another four.

"Stay focused, guys," I ordered, but it was difficult to get too mad at them for the goofy little grins on their faces as they rushed off to hassle Gaara. I was sure I looked giddier than all of them put together.

She was alive! My Sasuke was alive, and she was _here! _With me!

Another pair of clones rushed past me to join the brawl, giving me friendly punches on each shoulder as they passed, and I laughed. This was a serious mission, and my team was going to be in serious danger in very short order, but I couldn't help it. Taking the Rikudou Sennin's offer to come back had lifted the burden of countless deaths and hardships from my shoulders and immediately replaced them with the loss of my relationships as I knew them.

But now, now I had one of them back. I had _her _back. I felt like singing, dancing, and hugging the nearest living thing half to death.

"Get off me!" Gaara wheezed, thrashing against the clone currently bear-hugging the life out of him. Huh.

The Kazekage's youngest son jerked forward, a layer of his body tearing itself grotesquely from his frame to pry the clone from him. It died a second later, dragged into the seas of sand by a hand that was only about the size of a fully grown man rather than the Hokage Tower. The rest of the clones dancing around him died in short order, plainly overwhelmed.

Gaara sucked in a trembling breath, clutching the bloodied side of his face with white-knuckled fingers. "How do you keep touching me?" he asked. "How can you get past mother? How!?"

I smiled wickedly, crouching and shooting up into the air to avoid a crowd of murderous sand clones. I reached up and just barely managed to touch the tips of my fingers to a low-hanging stalactite, latching onto it with chakra and swinging up into a vertical crouch.

"It's real simple, Gaara!" I shouted, voice echoing over the constant scrape of sand against stone. "I've got people to protect, and a plan that everything is going according to!"

I wasn't just talking tough, either. Save for one small snafu in the form of Gaara dragging me off the cliff before I could deliver my cool one-liner, and Sasuke shouting the name of my spiritual predecessor at the top of her lungs, my plan was going swimmingly. I had Gaara right where I wanted him, and since this was my Sasuke- I stamped down another silly laugh- I wouldn't have to worry about my team not showing up in the right place for the last phase of this disastrous mission.

She'd steer Kakashi and Sakura exactly where they needed to go, which meant all I had to do was get there. Simple. Easy. _Cake._

"People to protect?" Gaara bit out, looking up at me with more offense than when I had almost blown a hole in his head. "Liar! What could other people give you that you haven't already given yourself?"

Here came the tricky part. I took a deep breath.

"Friendship, Gaara." The bloodied jinchuriki scoffed. "It's true! Every fight I've won has been for someone else. Every step I've taken past my limits, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears, it's all been for my friends! By myself I was nothing but a _waste_."

"You're a fool," Gaara growled, pointing at me and sending a torrent of sand rushing up to the ceiling.

Well. He wasn't wrong.

The caverns were even larger on the inside than they seemed from the cliffside, which was saying something considering how stupidly huge they looked. The air tasted salty and damp, a product of the rivers still coursing ceaselessly in from the sea. The walls were made up of slick, dark stone that resisted all but the surest of grips, rising in smooth waves that tapered off into jagged teeth at the roof of the cavern's mouth.

I could fit the Hokage Mountain between the highest and lowest points of the cavern with a few inches to spare. Maybe even a bijuu. And Gaara was flooding the place with sand.

All part of my master plan.

"You could be better than this!" I insisted, launching myself across the cavern's ceiling and bouncing between the stalactites, never giving the sands more than a second to track me. "You _will _be better than this! But not on your own, not without people. All the blood in the world isn't enough for the life you're living, and it never will be!"

"What do you know!?" Gaara shouted, removing his left hand from his wound long enough to drop another wave of sand onto the ceiling, surrounding me on all sides. "Nothing! I'll take all the world's blood if that's what it takes to validate my existence, starting with you. _Sabaku Sousou!_"

The sand converged on me in the blink of an eye, imploding with a noise like thunder.

Gaara's lips twitched in the beginnings of a maniacal smile as he watched the sand pour down from the ceiling. Then he realized there wasn't any blood mingling with the sand, and spun around just in time to catch two of my clones. His automatic defense crushed them without a second's mercy, and then exploded as the two clones following behind hit it with their joint rasengan, leaving him wide open for another sucker punch.

"Killing isn't the answer!" I smashed another rasengan in his face.

The shriek that tore through my fellow jinchuriki's throat made my stomach turn and my heart clench, but I forced myself to turn away from his pain and accept the rising tackle another clone hit me with, sending me back into the air. It hurt, but he'd be better off for it in the long run.

It was either now, in these caverns, or later, in the middle of Konoha. My home. And when I thought about it that way, it really wasn't a hard choice.

My clone's tackle didn't throw me nearly high enough to reach another stalactite, but it did save me from the titanic clawed hand that erupted from beneath Gaara and clenched around him. The hybrid appendage shook agitatedly, ebony claws of hyper-condensed sand grinding against one another until the whole thing collapsed in on itself.

I hit the ground in a hopping, skidding crouch, and tilted my head back to watch the writhing fountain of half formed hands, eyes, and clones that hoisted Gaara up into the air. It rose ten feet, twenty, and higher still, reverberating in time with the steady, agonized groan drifting past his lips. His face was covered up entirely by his trembling hands, the bloody grains of his second skin leaking between his fingers. Over a dozen eyes of various sizes bobbed above him, each and every one fixated on me.

I stomped down on another spike of sympathetic pain, turning and running for the nearest vertical surface. Couldn't back down now.

"Listen to me, Gaara!" I hollered. He didn't respond at all, just kept on groaning. I called up a crowd of clones to take the edge off the sand still pursuing me, leaping up onto the ceiling and sprinting across its jagged surface.

"This isn't what you want, not really. You know it's not! You want people who will accept you for who you are, not the weapon you were made to be. You want your brother and sister to treat you like their little brother. You want _love_. It's written all over your face!"

"You don't know me," Gaara rasped behind his fingers, sinking to his knees in the pillar of still rising sand. "You don't know anything."

I flipped over a stray lash of sand, the world spinning around me before I managed to halt my fall with a stalactite. I grit my teeth and drove every last drop of my emotion up to my throat, willing him to understand, willing him to _see_.

"I know you, Gaara. I know you need someone to pull you from the darkness your village left you to rot in. You need a friend. You need me." I slapped a hand to my chest, blanketing the ceiling of the cavern with my chakra and covering it with clones.

"Well, I'm here now," I continued, holding my hand out towards him, reaching desperately. "And I'm ready to pull you out of this life. _Believe _it."

"I don't know you," Gaara said, his voice growing stronger with each word, and the sands more agitated. "I don't need your friendship. I don't need love! I'm strong on my own! I don't need _anyone!_" He tore his hands from his face and jabbed them up at me, palms flat, revealing the hateful, bloody snarl on his face.

I sighed.

"_Taijuu: Rasengan._" Every single clone pushed off from the ceiling at once, spheres of spiraling chakra screaming in their hands, and fell upon my first best friend.

I closed my eyes and waited for the technique to run its course.

Almost a full minute later I felt a new presence slam into my senses, similar to Gaara in many ways, but more vile and hateful than my fellow jinchuriki could ever have managed. Which I guessed made sense. After all, Shukaku had had centuries to hate humanity.

**"FREE AT LAST!" **the weakest of the nine bijuu bellowed, and when I opened my eyes I found that the pillar of sand had doubled, tripled in size to accommodate Gaara's demonic ward. Shukaku was nearly at eye level with me, though I might as well have already been dead for all the attention he paid me. Head thrown back, arms spread wide, Shukaku was the picture of ecstasy.

I dropped down from the ceiling, landing silently some hundreds of feet below, my fall cushioned by the sand literally rolling off Shukaku in waves. He didn't even notice the impact, so wrapped up in his abrupt freedom.

**"TWELVE YEARS. TWELVE LONG, TORTUROUS YEARS, AND YOUR FOOL SON DIDN'T EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO USE ME IN YOUR PETTY WAR." **He roared with laughter, the sheer volume shattering a few stalactites that happened to be hanging too close.

Surprisingly enough, this was also part of the plan. Just not the part that I had wanted to resort to. Ever.

As much as I wanted to beat the sense back into Gaara as soon as physically possible, there was only so much I could do now. I didn't have the tools that I had grown so used to, that I had taken for granted as a sage. I had nothing that could stop Shukaku, let alone suppress him, except for Gaara himself. And he clearly wasn't up to the task as he was.

As much as I hated to admit it, even to myself, this mission was about more than Gaara. This was about saving an innocent civilian's life, regardless of how completely fucking stupid he was. It was about protecting Sakura from the horrors that had nearly broken her after Kakashi's death. It was about getting to know Kakashi this time around.

And now, god help me, it was about getting back to _my_ Sasuke and hugging the everloving hn out of her.

I couldn't die here. Not yet. But I couldn't beat Gaara either, not without the toads, not without Kurama. Not without nature. That left me with nothing left to do but rile jinchuriki and bijuu both up and leave them to rage themselves dry as far from civilization as physically possible.

Finally, after a good long laugh, Shukaku deigned to look down his snout at the Konoha nin responsible for freeing him.

**"YOU, BRAT," **he rumbled. **"YOU'RE THE ONE WHO HURT MY PITIFUL HOST?"**

"That's me," I said, gathering chakra in preparation for the largest batch of shadow clones I've made since my transmigration. Every one will count if I want the slightest chance of making it out of here in one piece.

The caverns had been the ideal venue for this fight. They had taken the rest of Gaara's team out of the picture, they were large enough to accommodate anything up to and including his full transformation, _and_ they provided me an alternative path to the last stage of my mission. They were the best choice all around.

But even so, I was still trapped in a cave with the Ichibi.

If only there was something I could do to it. If only I wasn't a scrawny little genin. If only, if only, if only. Shukaku was just too much, too soon, and I'd known that going into this. I don't know why I'd expected Gaara to be as reasonable as I was used to him being, but I had. Now, all I could do was leave him to his grief and Shukaku's wrath and hope he made it back to Suna after he finally burned out.

"Some friend I am," I muttered, good mood well and truly drained.

**"INDEED," **Shukaku said, amusement making his poisonous yellow eyes shine in the darkness. **"I APPRECIATE THE GESTURE. YOUR DEATH WILL BE THE FIRST, AND THE MOST PAINLESS."**

The caverns shuddered ominously as the vast tanuki shifted its weight, a single tail rising from the pool of sand gathered beneath it. It jerked from side to side, stretching out after years trapped behind bars. It brushed the roof of the cavern and snapped the stalactites off one by one, some of them wider around than the trunk of a tree, like they were nothing more than slivers of ice.

**"ONE SWIFT SMACK, LIKE SWATTING AN INSECT," **Shukaku explained. I closed my eyes, chakra rippling beneath the surface of my skin in preparation for my mad dash, and simply felt the bijuu for a moment.

In terms of raw destructive power, the Ichibi was the weakest of the nine bijuu by far. The Kyuubi could crush him with minimal effort, if confronted one on one, bijuu against bijuu. Or two on one. Three on one, as well. Point being, the Ichibi couldn't hold a candle to the Kyuubi, which I'd grown up with, fought with, and melded my chakra with.

He was the weakest of the nine without a doubt, and he still burned like the sun to my senses. So much natural energy gathered in one place, trapped in this one cavern, and tainted by so much _negativity_. Such hatred and rage, and beneath that, hurt, that it turned what should have been one of the world's most beautiful tenketsu into a throbbing sore that hurt just to look at.

This was wrong. I had seen it before, I could feel it in my bones. Such a negative existence could only wreak destruction with its natural energies. If I left now, countless living things would die. Animals, trees, and plants of all kinds. Organisms that trusted nothing more than Mother Nature's soothing energies would be wiped out by those same tender hands, warped and perverted by the negative emotions of a bitter bijuu.

Shukaku couldn't leave this cavern, I realized. He was too great a threat. Too great an _imbalance_. Something needed to balance his natural energies out.

Or someone.

"Oh, I'm an _idiot-_"

I felt her touch upon my brow a split second before it hit me, a teasing poke to the middle of my forehead. Wake up, Mother Nature whispered in my ear, and after three agonizing weeks of blindness, I finally opened my eyes.

**"WHAT THE-" **Shukaku grunted, shifting back in surprise as natural energy came pouring into the cavern, lapping against the walls and washing past sand as it came careening towards me.

I threw my head back and laughed. All this time, all these weeks spent bitching and moaning about the state of my body, and it had been my mind holding me back all along. I had grown so confident in my grasp of the world's chakra that I had completely forgotten why I was a sage. I had forgotten what a sage was, how they were made, why they _existed_.

Balance.

I felt Shukaku swing his tail around to crush me, and in the same moment, the same way, I felt a bird tending to its chicks in a nest hundreds of feet above me, felt Gaara's siblings and their sensei cowering at the mouth of the cavern, felt a colony of insects flee deeper into the caves, felt my team racing through the forests above towards an ambush.

Most importantly, though, I felt the trees. Above me, below me, all around me, I sensed bark and roots and countless leaves. Shukaku's tail crossed the full length of the cavern in the blink of an eye, and in the same moment I called upon all of the trees Mother Nature could give me.

**"DIE!"**

I clenched my fist, and a titanic hand made of dozens upon dozens of interwoven branches tore itself free of the earth and caught the Ichibi's tail at its widest point, stopping it in its tracks. Shukaku's eyes went wide, and then he howled in pain as the hand crushed his tail to sandy pulp.

"Saaa," I breathed, planting my feet and calling upon the rest.

The hand slammed itself flat against the earth, the groan of shifting wood mingling with Shukaku's pained wails as the massive construct strained to leverage the rest of itself from the earth. A moment later another hand burst up into open air on the other side of me, long, spindly fingers spreading themselves open wide. Roots and thicker branches soon followed, winding up its wrist and enveloping its fingers, making them thicker, firmer.

Then the second hand pressed itself to the ground alongside the first, and the cavern rocked as my creation dragged itself into the light.

The Fool broke through the earth beneath me, and I fell back into the bed of frenzied leaves and branches that made up its hair as it rose. I crossed my legs, slipping into slow, steady breaths, and focused on the Ichibi as my awareness and Mother Nature's ink continued to expand from that same, singular point on my brow where Konoha's symbol sat.

After the head and torso came the arms, rippling with muscles born of tree trunks and thick roots taken from the forests above. Then the legs, each even more thickly layered with wooden bulk than the arms. Finally, The Fool tore its feet from the earth, left, then right, and stood for the first time, once again.

Shukaku shrunk back another step, hiding his rapidly reforming tail behind him as he stared at my wooden colossus. **"WHAT IS THIS? WHO ARE YOU!?"**

I held out my hands and asked, "Could I get a hand?"

Being the generous lady she was, Mother Nature gave me two.

The thick branches of The Fool's hair closest to me twisted and bent, latching onto my wrists and winding up my hands. The gauntlets that Sasuke had given me were pried from my hands in short order, tumbling over the edge of The Fool's head and into the streams below. I made a quick note to apologize for that the next time I saw her.

It had been incredibly thoughtful of her to give me those gauntlets, especially now that I knew _she _knew the significance of them, and I appreciated it more than I could put into words. They were nice gauntlets, too, not too thin, not too thick. They were just how I liked them. Expertly crafted with the finest materials the Uchiha clan could buy, any shinobi would have been happy to have them.

But at the end of the day, they just couldn't match up to my wood.

Heh.

The ends of my new - old - gauntlets snapped off halfway down my forearms, leaving my hands covered fingertip to fingertip by the best chakra conductor known to man. I clenched and unclenched them, teeth flashing in a smile.

**_"Ahh. That's much better."_**

Um.

"You're not Kurama," I told the voice in my head.

_**"Not as such," **_they replied, the words deep, smooth, and tinged with unmistakable amusement. **_"I'd be closer to his brother."_**

"... Asura?" I asked. He hummed in confirmation, and I leaned back into The Fool, crossing my arms. "You took your sweet time."

**_"Just as my father could speak to you only after your death,_** **_so too was I restricted by my transmigration."_**

"I'm more alive than dead," I pointed out, noting that the Shukaku's tail had finished reforming, and his temper along with it.

**_"And I am more dead than alive. Time and space don't seem to mind," _**Asura said, followed by what might have been the strangest sensation I've ever felt. My ancestor's soul leaned over my shoulder, though I wasn't sure how I knew he was standing behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. **_"Now, don't mind me. We have work to do."_**

I considered disagreeing for a moment.

Only a moment.

The Fool slammed its clenched fists together, mouth yawning open to reveal countless jagged lengths of sharpened bark as it looked up at the Ichibi. It _roared_, knocking Gaara's siblings off their feet with the force of it, and the tangle of branches and bark and leaves that composed its chest lit up with a vibrant green light.

The Fool's heart beat in time with mine, and in turn, mine beat in time with the world's.

"Who am I? _Who am I!?_" I shouted, leaping to my feet and brandishing my own fists. "I'm the last man standing. I'm the one who's going to end the chain of hatred, unite the world, and bring back old man Rikudou's peace. I'm the heir to everyone that matters, Mother Nature's favorite tenketsu, and the ninth wonder of the world-"

I pumped my fists, and The Fool mirrored the gesture. I grinned wide and howled at the top of my lungs.

"Motherfucker, I'm _Uzumaki Naruto!_"

* * *

><p><strong>It happened without any warning. <strong>One moment I was running through the forest like a woman possessed, Hatake and Sakura hot on my heels with the client slung over Hatake's back, making a beeline for the fight that had taken the jonin's life once before. Running, and very pointedly _not _thinking about my Naruto, _my _Naruto, and the danger he was in, and the worry that he might have lost too much of his strength to finish what he'd started.

Then, in the next moment, the world changed.

I blinked, immediately calling upon my sharingan to confirm my frenzied hopes, and was just in time to see the change.

Chakra surged past us, a dizzying cacophony of every color under Amaterasu's sun, every bit of it rushing back to the caverns that he'd been dragged down to. And then, _then_, chakra came rushing back.

His chakra. Just like before, just like the first time, nature gave its chakra to Naruto, and in return Naruto gave his chakra to nature.

"Oh my," Hatake murmured, moving up beside me and glancing around with his uncovered sharingan.

The world's chakra was changing. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, but changing all the same. Yet another weight fell from my shoulders as I realized that it was beginning to look how I remembered it. Faintly orange. Faintly Naruto.

"I suppose you have an explanation for this as well?" Hatake asked, every bit as enraptured I was.

I smiled. "He's back."


	8. Chapter 8

**It took Gaara three days to wake up.**

Traversing the underground caverns of the Land of Rivers, it was difficult to tell exactly how much time had passed. Or rather, it would have been if I weren't Uzumaki Naruto. The perceptions of a sage made it easy enough to gauge the time of day based off the sleeping patterns of the wildlife, among other things. So when Gaara finally began to stir on my back, I had a good idea as to how long he'd been out.

I'd been making better time than expected. The caverns were even more extensive than I remembered them being, meaning I didn't have to worry about digging my way out to get to my destination. That, coupled with the extended view of the world Mother Nature shared with me, let me pull ahead of Team 7 without too much effort.

I had pulled so far ahead that by the time Gaara woke up I'd slowed to a casual walk. Couldn't crash the party before it started, after all.

"Wh-" Gaara's voice broke, swallowing the tail end of the word. He groaned, shifting uncomfortably on my back, and I formed a pair of clones to rummage through the pack I had swung across my chest.

"We didn't pack shit," clone on the left reported. I blinked.

"Not even an extra bottle of water?"

"No, remember we had to ask Sasuke for some on the way to Hot Springs? She did the weird kiss thing?" clone on the right reminded me. He tapped his chin. "Which, now that we know she's back, was pretty-"

Clone on the left slapped clone on the right over the head, dispelling him. He glared at the chakra smoke with icy blue disgust and turned on me. He jabbed two fingers at himself, then at me, and dispersed.

Clone on the left never really warmed up to Sasuke romantically.

I frowned. "Could have sworn I picked up water in Haru. Sorry, Gaara."

"What?" Gaara rasped, forcing the word from his battered throat.

"Was gonna offer you a drink, since you're so parched." I glanced around, having long since adjusted to the darkness of the caverns. "I've been burning chakra and drinking from the streams to keep me going for the last three days, mostly. I can dip you into one if you want."

"What?" he repeated. "I don't... What happened? Why aren't you..."

"Dead?"

He nodded.

I shrugged. "I'm pretty tough."

"But..." He cleared his throat, a painful, grating sound. "I've never been hurt before. Nobody has ever gotten past Mother. How did you do it?"

"I hit you hard."

"That's it?" he asked after a beat of expectant silence.

"Really hard."

"If that's true-" Gaara stiffened against my back. "If you put me to sleep, and I've been like this for three days, what happened to Mother? Why- why can't I hear her? What did you _do?_"

"I hit her harder," I said.

"Hit her," Gaara said blankly. "You hit Mother. And she didn't kill you."

"_Really _harder."

Gaara chewed on that for a good few minutes, leaving me to my idle musings on my team. They were close to the edge of my range, but close didn't mean a whole lot to a sage. I could feel their chakra as clearly as if they were right next to me, especially Sasuke's. It was as eye-catching as it had ever been, though smaller than it would be in the years to come. I wondered how frustrated that was making her. The drop in my own chakra reserves after the transmigration had been enormous, but that didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things.

Sharing chakra space with the Kyuubi in the womb, being born an Uzumaki, and then becoming the jinchuriki for said Kyuubi meant my reserves were going to be larger than I needed them to be no matter when I was. Sasuke, on the other hand, had dropped from a Kage's chakra reserves to an above average genin's in the span of a day. I could only imagine how restrictive it must feel.

"I don't understand," Gaara finally admitted, pulling my attention from the tiny blue star of chakra that was my crazy girlfriend.

"Understand what?"

"Anything," he said, frustrated. "You're just a genin, and I'm a monster. How could you have beaten me so decisively all by yourself? Only the Kazekage has ever managed it."

"Makes sense," I said, lips quirking. "Since I'm a Hokage in the making."

"Not only that!" Gaara said, rolling right over my nostalgic declaration. "But you- you _shut Mother up_. Not even he could do that. How did you? Why is it so quiet?" He groaned, thumping his forehead against the back of my head. I held back a snort.

"How are you carrying me?" he suddenly asked, shifting around on my back. "Mother should-" He cut himself off, having apparently reached the right conclusion, and I nodded.

"Yeah, Shukaku's locked down tight. No more automatic defense, no more sleep terrors, and _definitely _no more crazy murder whispers in your head."

"How?" Gaara asked desperately, and I wondered just how sharply his world had been turned on its axis by all this. In the first timeline it had been more of a gradual thing, seeing the way Konoha treated its shinobi, trying to beat his world view into them, and failing. Here... well. Maybe I had a bit more work to do.

"Look at your hands," I said. Gaara's arms twitched from their position around my shoulders, struggling to move and failing. He inhaled sharply.

"This is..."

His hands were locked together by a cocoon of chakra-infused wood. The conjoined manacles wound from the tips of his fingers down to his elbows, leaving my fellow jinchuriki's arms to dangle over my shoulders, keeping our piggyback balanced. The wooden manacles shimmered and pulsed to my senses, infused with a ridiculous amount of natural energy. Enough to suppress, say, a Bijuu.

"Those'll keep Shukaku's mouth shut until I take 'em off, and in the meantimeyou can sleep as long as you want!" I explained happily, walking across a stream with only a couple stumbling steps.

"Then why..." Gaara hesitated, as if afraid to finish his thought, before cautiously continuing. "Why haven't you killed me?"

Hm.

"Why would I kill you?" I asked, once I had moved on from mentally screaming assurances of our friendship at him.

"I am weak. Helpless." Gaara spat to the side, whether in disgust or in an effort to clear the bloody phlegm from his dried out throat, I wasn't sure. Maybe both. "You've proven that your existence is worthier than mine. I would not be able to stop you."

"That explains how I could kill you," I agreed. "But not why."

"... What?"

"Gaara, were you listening to me while I beat your ass?" I asked. He nodded mutely, and I sighed in relief. It was a pain getting worked up for a good, convincing speech like that if your blood wasn't already pumping.

"Then you know why I haven't killed you."

"Friendship," he said quietly. I nodded.

"Friendship."

"But what does friendship have to do with strength?" he asked. "You beat me because you were stronger. Faster. You even beat Mother. What does that have to do with having friends?" I hummed, considering the question. I hadn't been forced to spell it out for him the first time around, and certainly not like this.

"Why do you kill, Gaara?"

"To validate my existence," he said immediately.

"How does killing other people validate _your _existence?" I asked, tilting my head back and raising an eyebrow at him. Now that I looked at him, he really was in rough shape. The blood that had been covering his face before had blackened and crusted, and fresh crimson trails were leaking from the sides of his mouth. He was alert, though, in a way he hadn't been before. He looked thoughtful.

He hadn't realized it yet, but time away from Shukaku's influence was already starting to change him for the better.

"By killing those who seek to kill me," he said slowly, mulling over his words. "I prove that my desire to live outweighs their own. They can fear me, shun me, despise me, but they can never take away my right to live. In killing another, I prove that my life is worth more than theirs. I deserve to exist more than they do, no matter how much people love them more than me."

I accepted his words, his ideology, in silence. He hesitated to continue, waiting for me to confirm or deny his beliefs, and when I didn't he settled into uneasy silence.

I gave him a minute to squirm, and then asked, "How does it feel?"

"Incredible," he said. "The feeling of blood staining my sand, of crushing the life out of another, there's nothing that can compare."

"Is that really how you feel?" I asked, no particular inflection in my voice.

"Yes," he said firmly.

"Then, do you want to kill me?"

"Of course I-" Gaara fell silent, and I grinned.

"It's just you up there right now, Gaara. I don't care what Shukaku thinks. Tell me how _you _feel."

"I... don't want to kill you," he said, voice raspy with disbelief.

"Friendship!" I cheered.

"That's- what-"

"All this time, you've been alone with the Shukaku," I said, the words falling into place moments before I said them. "Your mom died when you were born, your dad might as well have died too for all the good he did, and your village was terrified of you. Even your brother and sister, the two people who should have loved you the most, were convinced that you were a monster. Something to be avoided."

Though not as thoroughly as they might have believed. Even now I could feel Gaara's team tracking us at a very, very healthy distance. Call it common sense, call it preserving a weapon for their village, but they were worried for him.

"I know how that feels," I continued, smiling sadly. "I know how suffocating it is to have your worth as a human being denied. A person's right to exist should never be a question, but it was for us."

"You know?" Gaara asked. "How?"

I patted my stomach. "Shukaku's only one of nine, you know."

"Demon," Gaara breathed.

"Yep."

"How..." he hesitated again, struggling to come to terms with this new information without Shukaku to guide his thoughts. "How do you stand it? The looks, the words. Don't they madden you? Don't they _kill _you?"

"They do," I said softly. "They always have."

"What's different?" he pressed. "What happened to you that made you so much stronger, so much happier-" The answer struck him all at once, and I tilted my head again to smile at him, genuinely.

"Friends."

We walked on for a good long while after that in silence, Gaara hanging loosely off my back while I took us to another battle, another pointless conflict. At one point, deciding we were still far enough ahead to take a quick break, I formed another pair of kage bunshin and tapped the wooden shackles joining Gaara's hands together. They parted like strands of fine silk beneath my touch, separating into two gauntlets that would continue to suppress Shukaku's chakra while I answered nature's call.

When I returned, whistling a tuneless little melody that Sasuke's aunt used to sing to her, I found my clones carefully holding Gaara above one of the caverns' many streams while he drank greedily.

"He's gonna need food at some point," clone on the right said, waving at me. I waved back, rummaging through my pack for a rations bar. I doubted he'd thank me for the tasteless crap, but it'd keep him going.

Clones on the left and right heaved Gaara up onto my back once he'd had his fill, and I sealed his gauntlets back together with another tap of my finger. I tore the wrapping off the rations bar and poked it at his mouth. He turned his head.

"Look, I know they don't taste good, but it is what it is. You need to get something in your stomach." Being a jinchuriki meant you had some leeway that others didn't when it came to eating and drinking - survival in general, I guess - but it couldn't keep you going indefinitely. Trust me. I knew.

"Who was your first friend?" Gaara murmured. Ah.

"His name's Iruka," I said, shoving the rations bar in a pocket to be forgotten like it deserved. "He taught me in the Academy, or tried to. I was a terrible student. The other sensei didn't like me, my classmates ignored me, and I really didn't work as hard as I should have. He didn't care, though. He gave me the benefit of the doubt, and when push came to shove he chose me over a friend he'd known for years, because he knew I didn't deserve the abuse.

"Me. The village brat. The nuisance no one wanted anything to do with. The demon." I chuckled. "I don't know what he saw in me, but I'm glad he did."

"I see."

"My first _best_ friend took a little more work," I continued, heaving Gaara up into a more comfortable position on my back as I walked.

"Best friend," Gaara said, testing the term. "What is the difference?"

"It's a little hard to explain," I said. "A friend is someone that brightens your day. They take you out to eat ramen, they help you clean your apartment out when you can't find your favorite orange jacket, and they make the stares and the words from the rest of the world bearable. You'd die for them, no questions asked."

"_Die?_" Gaara gasped. "Would that not defeat the purpose of living for them?"

I laughed. "Why do you think I'm so strong?" I asked. "If I have to choose between my death and a friend's, I'll die every time. That's why I need to be strong enough for us _both _to live. Living for yourself will never lead to true strength. Living to protect another day is the only way to break through your own limitations. You're always strongest when you're protecting those precious to you."

**_"Wise words," _**Asura said. I rolled my eyes, accepting the compliment with a small smile.

"If that is the value of a friend," Gaara said, "then what is the value of a _best _friend?"

"A best friend is just a friend, but more. They'll do all the stuff a friend does, but they'll do it no matter how many times you ask, no matter when you ask. Hell, no matter where you ask," I said, fond memories resurfacing of Godaime Kazekage Gaara receiving my invitation to stop by Konoha for ramen sometime and appearing at the village gates the next morning. Poor Suna had been so shaken up by his disappearance that they'd gone into lock down.

"A friend will only ever see the best sides of you, because that's what they deserve to see. They're already holding the rest of the world at bay for you. They don't need to deal with your angst on top of that. But if you slip up around your best friend, it's okay. They won't tell." I breathed deeply, in, out, lessening the pressure that had crept through my chest, encircling my heart.

"A friend makes the rest of the world bearable. If you have a best friend, the rest of the world doesn't even matter. You'd die for a friend, but you'd have to beat your best friend to the punch before they died for you."

"I see," Gaara whispered. "That sounds... nice."

"It is."

"Who was your first best friend?"

"He was a real jackass when I first met him. Most best friends are, though," I said, grinning. "Went on and on about how he was going to tear me apart if I didn't get out of his way, I knew nothing about his pain, I was a fool, yadda yadda. Y'know, best friend stuff. It took one helluva beat down on both sides for me to realize he wasn't nearly as bad as I'd first thought.

"He was mostly just me, if I hadn't found that first friend. He was sad and angry, and his only company was even sadder and angrier than him. He covered it up, but after a real good fight you can sorta tell. He didn't want to kill, deep down. He wanted someone to realize he wasn't the monster he pretended to be, and love him for the human being he was."

I glanced sidelong at Gaara, and found him staring back at me with wide eyes. "He looked a lot like you," I decided. "His name was Gaara."

"You-" he choked. "You..."

"Me," I agreed. "All you need is a plain old friend to pull you out of the darkness. I'll give you one better."

"Why?"

"No one deserves the life we lived," I said. "I've had a lot of enemies, but if there's someone out there I'd condemn to that, I haven't met 'em. We're all people in the end. We all have the potential to do good." I reached back and tapped him on his love tattoo. "You could do so much more good than bad, Gaara. And you will." And you have.

"I don't know how to be a best friend," Gaara admitted, ashamed. I laughed again.

"Don't worry about it. You're a natural."

"How do you know?" he asked, though without the scorn or the doubt that had permeated our conversation before. Now he just sounded mystified. "I could have sworn I'd never met you before. How do you know me so well already?"

I tapped my own forehead, right on the crimson dot where Mother Nature had prodded me awake, and smiled.

"The best friends always do." 

* * *

><p>"The arcana is the means by which all is revealed."<p>

"The arcana," Sasuke echoed, marveling at the ridiculousness of it all. "Those are playing cards."

"They are symbols," the Rikudou Sennin corrected her, flicking a finger and splitting the deck of hyper-dense chakra cards. Individual tarot drifted through the air between them, one following another in a slowly expanding ring. Sasuke counted twenty-two before the black chakra constructs lit up with scalding white light.

"The tarot are stand-ins for the arcana," the Sage said, gesturing at the completed ring of twenty-two cards. The white light burned through each of them, carving out numbers and pictures that were vaguely familiar for reasons Sasuke couldn't recall. "The arcana is no physical thing. It is a concept, a series of steps-" And here he smiled. "A story."

"What does this have to do with bringing Naruto back?" Sasuke snapped. This talk of a dead man's children and storytelling cards meant _nothing _to her. She had no time, either to listen to this or to fix things. Even in the perfect health that this strange dream had rendered her, she felt her eyes burning and her chest constricting around her heart at the fresh, bleeding memory of Naru- her- his-

It was too much. He wasn't supposed to die. Damn him, damn the rest, he shouldn't have to die for them. He should have saved _himself_.

"The arcana," the Rikudou Sennin said gently, "Is the journey that will bring you together again."

Sasuke sucked in a breath, finally looking down at the woman standing in her reflection for some sort of confirmation. She didn't like the idea of some woman who couldn't manage her own feelings claiming Sasuke's soul in any capacity, didn't like it at all, but if she could bring Naruto back...

Indra's reflection met her frantic gaze, and smiled with barely restrained anticipation. Sasuke's heart leapt.

"How?" she demanded of history's most powerful shinobi. "What do I do? What do you want from me?"

The Sage waved a placating hand. "I want nothing from you, Uchiha Sasuke, but for you to continue walking the path you are already on."

If this cryptic dialogue was a person, she'd have already stabbed them.

"How do I do that?"

"As I said, the arcana is a story." The Sage plucked a card from the air, its scalding white decal showing a man with two zeros beneath his feet. "It is the story of a Fool's Journey, and every card is a step along their path."

"You're calling me a fool," Sasuke said flatly. In her peripheral vision, she saw Indra's reflection raise a hand to cover her amused smirk.

"We are all fools in the beginning," the Sage said, his godlike eyes - how she hated those eyes - dancing. "Though, admittedly, some more so than others.

"The Fool's Journey is a story of self-actualization. In progressing through each stage of the arcana they bring themselves closer and closer to nature and the elements. A fool is a fool, from beginning to end, but that is not necessarily bad." The Sage twirled the Fool's card in his hand, and the rest of the tarot began orbiting it. "The Fool is the first of the arcana. It is the number zero- nothing and everything at once. It possesses infinite potential.

"Unfortunately, that potential is not always realized."

"Indra," Sasuke said, and at Indra's offended look added, "And Asura."

"Precisely." The twenty-one tarot broke off from the Fool's card and drifted over to Sasuke, orbiting around her in its place. "You know of the power my line wields, and by now I hope you know of the burden that comes with that power."

Sasuke thought of herself and _that woman_, of bleeding eyes and ever encroaching madness. She thought of Naruto, of brave smiles and merciless crucifixions. She inclined her head to the Rikudou Sennin and his daughter, because she did know. She knew more than she had ever dreamed of knowing back when her own brother had torn her world out from under her.

She knew more than she could ever hope to forget.

"I thought you would," the Sage said, twisting the statement into an apology. She ignored it. "You know the burden grows heavier the deeper you delve into that strength. The constant pressure of it weighs on your sanity, sharpens your pains, and eventually, you break beneath its weight. It happened to my children. It happened to Madara and Hashirama."

"But not you," Sasuke realized, the Sage's eclectic speech finally coming together in her head. He smiled.

"Sasuke... What is it you want to do? What do you hope to gain through this fight? I want to hear what it is you honestly think."

What did she want? Sasuke reeled at the question, and the weight behind it. She knew instinctively that this was a turning point in the conversation- one way or another, the riddles ended with her answer. She couldn't afford to be wrong.

So what did she want? What had brought her to that battlefield? She hadn't expected to win, not really. The odds were stacked against them, and they had been for years. Why had she thrown herself into the open maw of the Juubi's restless corpse, fought for an entire nation of people she couldn't care less about, and killed herself trying to strike down Uchiha Madara? For what?

For who?

"I..." she whispered, blinking angrily against the tears. "I just want him back."

"So that is your answer," the Sage mused. She held her breath. "I understand."

The tarot revolving around Sasuke drew in closer, and she gasped as one of them brushed the skin of her shoulder. The hyper-dense chakra surged through her like lightning, and along with it came _memories. _Memories of battle, of the clean burn of a black flame, and of rough lips against her own. She found herself falling into laughing blue eyes all over again at the tarot card's touch.

She pulled back from the chakra construct, looking at its design with wide eyes. A heart supported by a tree, with a man and a woman standing on either side of it. Above it all, a sun.

**The Lovers.**

"Desire found in the arms of another," the Sage said, amused. "Perhaps more literally than usual."

Another card brushed her left ear, and Sasuke hissed as darker memories struck her. Memories of cold, slithering things, of corpses and screaming and blood red eyes that for once were not her own. Shame and self-loathing, past and present, coursed into her from the card. She jerked back, refusing to look at the card, but knowing its name nonetheless.

**The Hierophant. **

The Sage sighed. "The first level of understanding. A reevaluation of one's understanding of the world and its structure."

She supposed that if any word fit that particular day, reevaluation was it.

The next card she dodged, watching its scalding white chariot drift innocently by with some contempt. Another promptly grazed her ankle, and she found herself flooded with memories of sunlit canopies of leaves and deep, relaxed breaths. She felt cool bark against her back and warm skin beneath her fingers. Sasuke took a moment longer to remove herself from this card, but only a moment. The card, depicting a lantern above an eye ringed with concentric circles, floated lazily on.

**The Hermit.**

"Comfort in oneself, found in the withdrawal from another."

And so they went. One after another, Sasuke found herself drawn into memories from her past by the Rikudou Sennin's tarot. Almost all of them were violent, and _all _of them involved him in some way. Her stupid, _stupid _lover.

Eleven of the twenty-one cards revolving around her came and went, and then the Sage flicked the Fool's card from his hand towards her. She hesitated. The memories before this had all come from very specific points in her life, very specific occurences, all with a general theme connecting them. If this was the first card, the first memory, she had a good idea of what it would be.

Nevertheless, she reached out and touched the card.

Closed her eyes.

And pushed it away.

Some memories did not bear dwelling on.

"A beginning for two young fools," the Sage said quietly.

"Then this journey," Sasuke said, watching the tarot drift away one at a time with some relief. "It's how you became as strong as you are without breaking?"

The Sage nodded. "Every step of the Fool's Journey unlocks yet more of one's hidden potential. My children never finished their journeys, and neither did any of their descendents. My sibling and I have been the only ones in our lines to manage it, and so we were the only ones to withstand the curse of our family's power."

Sasuke accepted this information, processed it, and-

Paused.

"Your sibling?" she asked, tilting her head. From the corner of her eye, she found Indra's reflection looking at her father with similar intensity.

"Yes. Ootsutsuki Hamura."

"Hamura," Sasuke murmured. A masculine name. It seemed to be a trend. "I thought you said this cycle of love and hatred began with your children, sage."

The Rikudou Sennin remained silent. Indra's eyes widened in outrage.

"Was it different for the two of you?" Sasuke asked. "Did you accept her feelings where Asura and Hashirama did not?"

The Sage closed his eyes, looking well and truly his age, and admitted, "I like to hope those feelings did not exist."

Sasuke scoffed. "Of course you do." It figured that her idiot would be the man with the most sense of this entire line.

"So you see," the Sage said. "My children and their descendents fell short in their journeys because they could not face their own desires and accept them. And how could I guide them towards doing so, when I had never experienced such a thing myself?

"That is why you're different, Uchiha Sasuke. You and Asura's descendent managed to do what none of your predecessors have done. You accepted your feelings for one another, acted upon them, and made them your strength. My children know it too, which is why Indra remains by your side even now. She knows that you have the greatest potential to complete your Fool's Journey, and in the doing unlock the full potential of her power."

"But I didn't," Sasuke said. The twelfth memory, **The Hanged Man**, had been far too recent for her to have worked through the rest of the tarot between then and now. She had failed like all the rest.

"You haven't," the Sage agreed. "Not yet." And suddenly, the thirteenth card, the one that had never stopped orbiting her, rose up . It rotated slowly, its scalding white design that of a human skull. Sasuke didn't even need to touch it to know its name and the memory it possessed.

**Death.**

"Death, contrary to what you might think, does not imply the end of a life. It is an end, but a good end. It is the greatest transition, from the first half of the journey to the last." The Sage spread his hands, and every one of the cards but Death rushed back to him, melting into one another and splitting off into six spheres of dense black chakra once again.

"If you wish to continue your journey, Sasuke, save the world from the threat that Uchiha Madara poses, and return to Uzumaki Naruto, you must embrace Death."

Yes. _Yes._ "How?"

The Rikudou Sennin reached out and offered her his left hand.

"Transmigration."

* * *

><p><strong>"What's going on, Sasuke?" <strong>Sakura asked for what must have been the dozenth time in as many minutes. I rolled my eyes, but didn't otherwise snap at her. I was in too good a mood.

"We're following the caverns," I said.

"But _where? _And how do you know we're following the caverns?"

Because I've been here before. I've turned these caverns inside out, for various unseemly reasons. On top of that, I could _feel _Naruto's awareness on my skin. It was unmistakable. The one fatal flaw of his otherwise unparalleled sensor abilities.

You _felt _Naruto. In the same way a shinobi unconsciously felt the chakra of the world around them and adapted themselves to it, Naruto's influence could be felt in the trees, the flora, even the wildlife. If Naruto wanted to find you, all of nature was against you.

It would have been unnerving if I hadn't worked it to my advantage years ago.

"Hard to explain," I finally said.

"Another topic for later?" Kakashi asked. I grimaced and nodded.

Convincing the elite jonin to leave Naruto for the Ichibi hadn't been easy. It had taken a promise of more than a few explanations in the future, ranging from my knowledge of lightning manipulation to Naruto's use of the rasengan. He hadn't mentioned the names of our ancestors, but I doubted he'd missed it. That would probably be another explanation he'd demand of us once this was all said and done.

And even so, I doubt he'd have gone along with it if I hadn't guided him along the same path he'd taken us the first time around. This path was familiar to him, and he knew that it would eventually lead us to safety in the form of a Konoha outpost on the eastern border.

It was a happy coincidence that this same path would pass by an opening in the underground network of caverns. A happy coincidence that I didn't doubt Naruto had taken into account.

We were close. My memory was fuzzy this far back, except for the flashes of clarity that came from the moments I'd had my sharingan active. I knew our final destination, though, and that was enough. Naruto's constant presence kept me on track. He would know exactly where he was going.

I realized I was smiling again, and schooled my features.

"Someone's in a good mood," Kakashi observed.

"Quiet, Hatake."

"Sasuke, he's our _sensei-_"

"Quiet, Sakura."

I was getting ahead of myself. I needed to focus on the fight at hand, and how I was going to handle it. I could stall until Naruto got there, of course, and from that point on there wouldn't be much thinking required. There was only one insufferable cunt in the world capable of defeating both of us at the same time, and she was almost certainly dead at this point in the timeline. They wouldn't stand a chance.

Assuming Naruto made it to the fight in time, and that Kakashi didn't die first.

I had to be smart about this. I'd been conserving my chakra well, and in the short breaks between runs most of my reserves had been restored. By my measure I could safely handle two genuine chidori, or a single chidori nagashi. The former could be useful in putting down the monkey, but the latter might allow me to clear the battlefield of all opponents but said monkey, leaving Kakashi to face off with him until Naruto arrived.

But _that _was assuming Kakashi could handle the monkey for any length of time. Not a risk I was thrilled to take. Amaterasu knew I'd never hear the end of it if I let Naruto's sensei die when there had been a chance to save him.

So I had to be smart. I had to map this fight out in its entirety. I had been thinking about the people involved for weeks. I knew enough of them from the first timeline to use now. I could flip this entire encounter on its head and have things wrapped up in less than a minute if I only-

"Stop!"

Hn.

I plucked a kunai out of the air with contemptuous ease as it came hurtling towards me, twisting and flicking it into another. They glanced off each other with a metallic chime and hurtled off in two different directions, each intercepting another two kunai on their way to Sakura and Kakashi's throat and eye, respectively.

I landed on one of the flimsier branches, swaying up and down with the wind as I called upon my chakra. My pulse redoubled in my veins, heart beating a tattoo against my chest as my newly advanced sharingan whirled to life. Two tomoe in each eye, along with the rediscovered ability to copy actions and techniques. Out of date, but getting better.

Kakashi landed in front of me, to my chagrin, while Sakura took up a position to my left. The chunin rounded up the rear with our woefully conscious client trembling on his back.

And in front of us came the Iwa contingency.

The Sandaime Tsuchikage's granddaughter touched down a mere tree's length from Kakashi, her pink eyes narrow and serious. Kurotsuchi was only a few years older than I would have been the first time around, standing a full head shorter than Kakashi. The jonin flak jacket worn over her tan and red uniform, however, suggested that she was just as advanced for her age as I had been for mine.

Well. In the same league, at least. Maybe.

Behind her, a complete dozen Iwa nin assumed formation. In comparison to the trash that had been in the process of ambushing the client and his team of Konoha nin before we sabotaged them days ago, this was a far more competent group of shinobi. Chunin vests still abounded, but mixed in here and there were flak jackets that could only belong to a tokubetsu jonin. This was an elite team, composed of the most highly skilled shinobi that a village could afford to restrict to a single team.

And it was twice the size it should have been.

The reason for this plowed through a branch, hitting the forest floor in a crouch and bouncing back up into the treetops in the time it took Sakura to gasp. The monkey stood by the Tsuchikage's granddaughter as an equal, crossing his arms and surveying our group with unimpressed eyes.

The monkey humphed, flicking a contemptuous hand through his bristly red beard. "Pulled my team off track for the Copy Cat and a few brats? What happened to bein' a big bad jonin, Kuro-chan?"

"Don't call me that," Kurotsuchi growled. The monkey shrugged, the slabs of muscle layered over his neck and shoulders rolling with the motion.

He was powerfully built, for all his years. He wore a long-sleeved shirt colored Iwa's signature muddy red, parted to reveal a mesh shirt stretched to its limits across the man's barrel chest. Dark grey pants fell just past his knees and tucked into thin shin wraps, completing the outfit. Every one of the monkey's movements broadcasted strength, and his clothing only amplified that message.

He was Yoton no Roshi, jinchuriki to the Yonbi, and aside from the Tsuchikage himself he was the oldest and most powerful shinobi Iwa had to offer. That, and he would be Kakashi's murderer in the very near future if I didn't do something about it.

"Yoton no Roshi," Kakashi said. His single uncovered eye flickered back to me, and I could practically see the thoughts and plans rushing through his finely honed mind. "Is there something we can do for you?"

Roshi sighed. "Look, kid. I was supposed to be home, in a bath, and hammered half to hell two days ago. I don't have the patience for diplomacy right now. Do what Kuro-chan says or I'll burn ya to the ground."

"Stand down and surrender the noble," Kurotsuchi commanded Kakashi. "What you did to Udo's team won't be forgiven, but the Tsuchikage will consider your salvation if you come peacefully. Stand _down_."

"This Udo," Kakashi said, in a soothing voice that seemed completely wrong for him. "He lead a team of chunin, correct?"

"That's right," Roshi drawled.

"Then I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding. Udo's team attacked a team of Konoha shinobi without provocation in our own territory. My team only came to their lawful aid." The elite jonin splayed his hands, a gesture of peace that brought his left hand conveniently close to his headband-covered eye.

"Her granddad wants the noble," Roshi explained. "Udo's team was pursuin' him in the Tsuchikage's name, makin' their actions most lawful by default."

"That's not how it works," Sakura blurted, no doubt without thinking, and quailed beneath the sharp looks that Kakashi and the Iwa contingency sent her.

Roshi laughed.

"We're in neutral territory, girlie," he said genially. "Konoha laws don't mean what they do back home." His chakra rippled and pulsed in time with the words, revealing lakes upon rivers upon _oceans _of chakra roiling inside him. Chakra enough to sustain a bijuu. As much chakra as my beloved fool.

Well. In the same league, at least. _Maybe_.

Kakashi stared off against the Tsuchikage's granddaughter and his most powerful shinobi. Seconds ticked by with naught but the heavy breathing of our client and the presence of Naruto's chakra to keep me company. Then Kakashi sighed and lifted his headband from his stolen - borrowed? - eye.

"Sasuke, Sakura," he said. "Leave. Find Naruto. _Now_."

Roshi rolled his eyes and his chakra came unbound, rolling red hot over us like a physical thing. Sakura wavered on her feet, clamping down on a terrified whimper. She looked to me, terrified, panicked, looking for guidance.

"_Chidori..._" I whispered, gripping the hilt of my chokuto.

"Sasuke!" Kakashi snapped, already moving as Kurotsuchi started blurring through hand seals. The monkey turned the full weight of his attention on me, tensing-

"_Nagashi!_"

My blade leapt free of its sheathe alight with electricity, and with a single vicious swing I bathed the forest in its light.

Lightning and chakra rushed out of me and into the air, parting around Kakashi and converging on the next closest target- the monkey. He fell from his branch with a startled grunt, and the lightning branched back out, tagging every shinobi in sight. Startled shouts and screams of pain careened from the throats of a dozen veteran Iwa nin, music to my ears.

Over half of them fell to the forest floor in convulsing heaps, acrid smoke coming off their skin in plumes. Four, three tokubetsu jonin and a very lucky chunin, managed to collect themselves in time to stick the landing on the forest floor. Wind specialists, perhaps, or some other miscellaneous technique I hadn't caught.

I was a bit preoccupied dodging the monkey for all I was worth.

Roshi shed the paralyzing effects of the chidori nagashi in seconds, took one look at Kurotsuchi's fight with Kakashi, and disappeared in a seamless shunshin. My eyes just barely caught the motion of it, immature as they were, and I dashed to the left. Even using my own shunshin, I only avoided his hammer blow by a margin that was two fingers thick.

"Helluva sucker punch!" Roshi complimented, yanking his arm out of the tree trunk he'd buried it in. He flexed his hands along with his chakra, and the temperature between us jumped a good ten degrees. "Wonder how much y've got left to give."

Not enough. "Enough."

"We'll see, won't we?" He disappeared in another shunshin, and I had no choice but to respond in kind.

The world dissolved into a stream of high speed motions, one after another. The shunshin wasn't a particularly chakra-intensive technique, being a simple improvement on the natural augmentations that all shinobi performed unconsciously. I could use it just about non-stop until Naruto arrived, whenever he arrived, even with my greatly reduced reserves. That wasn't to say I wanted to, though.

The shunshin's primary drawback, and the reason it wasn't the standard for all shinobi conflict, was that it was _too fast_. The naked eye couldn't keep up with the sheer intensity of movement that the shunshin provided, meaning that a shinobi using it in battle was running on instinct, muscle memory, and depending on how much they had of the first two, dumb luck.

A shinobi with Roshi's skill and experience could utilize it flawlessly _almost _every time. With my sharingan, I had enough awareness to avoid the absolute worst collisions and keep up with the fight. With a fully matured sharingan _and _the skill and experience that could only come with years of repeated use?

There was a reason Shunshin no Shisui was such a dangerous shinobi, despite specializing in a D-rank jutsu that lazy sensei taught their students in place of actual techniques. I had been close to that level of mastery before my transmigration. Now, I was just barely proficient enough to keep the fight going.

Roshi appeared to my right a scant second before I came out of my own shunshin, reoriented himself as I emerged from the technique, and barreled into me with all two hundred plus pounds of him.

"Sasuke!"

I thrashed in his grip, struggling to bring my chokuto around, but there was no moving him. I crashed into and through one branch, then another, and another, until all that was left between Roshi and the ground was me. I looked up at him, at the confident, almost relaxed set of his eyes, and snarled.

Lightning exploded to life between us, striking Iwa's jinchuriki at the arms and chest in a miniature chidori nagashi. Like the one I'd used in the fight three days ago, it was far less powerful for the reduced chakra cost. Roshi didn't even release his grip.

He did loosen it, though, just enough for me to move my sword arm.

I drove my chokuto into the juncture between his third and fourth ribs, aiming for the heart, but my blade had barely cleared three inches when his bear hug tightened and then tightened again. I arched into his grip, my vision flickering white, and then Roshi let go and I hit the ground.

I had the presence of mind to shunshin to the right as soon as I felt firm earth beneath me, scrambling to my feet and dashing away with just enough speed to avoid a pile driver that would have ended my life.

I panted harshly, my back an uninterrupted plane of screaming flesh, and chanced a glance around me as Roshi straightened up. In the first timeline, Kakashi had fielded both the monkey and the Tsuchikage's granddaughter while Naruto and I tried to do _something _against the entourage of chunin and tokubetsu jonin. Taking some weight off of our sensei had to have had some positive-

The forest was on fire.

I disappeared in another shunshin, avoiding a low jab that would have broken at least one rib, and kept moving towards what I assumed was Kakashi's side of the fight. Around me, trees burned. A quick application of wind chakra bent the smoke that was beginning to choke the forest, allowing it to hug my skin without actually impeding me. Easier to move through, with the bonus of obscuring me from my opponent's sight.

It was possible that he could sense me anyway, but something told me Roshi wasn't much of a sensor. That didn't usually come with a heavy hitter's skill set. Naruto was, as always, an exception.

I froze at the roar of a nearby flame, and hopped sideways as an honest to Amaterasu meteor slammed into a tree some ways off, shattering it at the base and setting the corpse alight. The meteor, its diameter as wide around as Kakashi was tall, kept going unimpeded by the first tree. Then it hit another. And another. And another.

_Yoton _no Roshi. Right.

Flames of a more banal nature followed the jinchuriki's shot in the dark, lighting up the forest on by one. It seemed a couple of the living tokubetsu jonin were katon specialists.

I narrowed my eyes, peering through the smoke to the chakra beyond, and found my target. It was hard to miss him, as densely packed with chakra as he was. I considered my options for a moment, watching him hock and spit another meteor at a patch of forest dangerously close to my teammate, the chunin, and the client. Sakura cried out as the heat of it washed over them, and Roshi immediately reoriented on them through the smoke.

I paused. Watched him rear up for another meteor. Considered.

... Best not.

_Katon: Gokakyu no Jutsu!_

My own fireball hurtled through the smoke, one amongst dozens, and consumed the monkey from hips to the tips of his violently red hair. Of course, he was still standing when the flame passed, and said violently red hair was only marginally singed, but it interrupted his technique.

And brought his attention back to me.

Blinded as he was by the smoke, there was only so much I could do before he found me. I dashed off again, but this time he was on my heels, and soon enough he'd overtaken me entirely. I twisted halfway through a shunshin and lashed out with my chokuto right as we came level with one another, opening his forearm up with one clean stroke.

I might as well have missed for all the mind he paid it. He humphed and kicked out at my wrist, seeking to disarm me. I hissed in pain as bone crumpled and broke beneath the blow, but I held onto my blade all the same.

Then Roshi planted his feet and twisted his fingers, _dog ox hare snake_, and threw his head back.

"Well now," I murmured, watching the chakra boil and surge up his throat.

The meteor erupted from his mouth no farther than five yards away from me, burning uncomfortably against my skin before it even took shape. I gathered chakra for another shunshin, knowing as I did that it wouldn't be fast enough. I was going to suffer for this hubris, one way or another.

Death or disfigurement. Depending on Naruto's reaction, I wasn't sure which was worse.

"Heads up!"

A silver-haired blur that utterly baffled my immature sharingan hit me in the core of my stomach, driving the breath from my lungs and wiping away the world around me. I blinked and found myself outside the meteor's area of effect, struggling to catch a breath while Kakashi carefully set me on my feet. By the time I did manage a short gasp he was already gone, diving back into the fray with Roshi in hot pursuit.

"... Hn."

"Sasuke!"

I turned, raising an eyebrow at Sakura as she touched down in front of me. She was wild eyed, frayed around the edges, and clearly out of her depth. For all that, she had a kunai clenched firmly in both hands and didn't look like she intended to move before I did.

At least she was doing her job, I supposed.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"You're hurt," she said, as if I couldn't feel the ache in my back and the tension in my sunburnt skin. Hubris, indeed. I needed more chakra and a better body. Better as in stronger, not- well, perhaps both.

"I'm fine. What's the situation?"

"Kakashi-sensei beat the Tsuchikage's granddaughter back," Sakura reported, inching back a step as a tree heaved a tortured groan and went down in flames. "I don't know where she went. The other Iwa nin tried to gang up on him, but he was too fast, so they turned on the client."

"And?"

"I don't know. Tatsuno took him and fled, but I lost him. I'm not sure how far he could have gotten, though." Sakura looked bleakly around. "There isn't much forest left."

I inhaled, sulfur and the cloying scent of burnt life filling me to the brim. I idly wondered how many fire specialists one Iwa team could have as I drank in the ruined forest, the trees burnt to the roots and the grassy grounds wiped bare. I exhaled, easing my chokuto into the hand with the functioning wrist, and leapt into another shunshin.

Sakura shrieked as I threw her over my shoulder and rushed deeper into the flaming ruin. Behind us, the Iwa chunin and a tokubetsu jonin riddled the earth we'd been standing on with metal. They rushed after us, one gripping a katana in two hands while the other dug in their pockets for more kunai. I pivoted and threw us into another two shunshin in quick succession, vanishing into the smoke.

"You- you-" Sakura sputtered while I deposited her from my shoulder to the scorched dirt.

"Not all of them went after the client," I explained. Perhaps unnecessarily, perhaps not. You never knew with pink-haired girls.

"You _saved _me."

I rolled my eyes, pulling a roll of medical tap from the pouch on my thigh and winding it around my broken wrist. "Didn't do it for you."

Sakura frowned. "Then who-"

The earth lurched beneath us as the monkey pounded not one, but _five _meteors into it all at once. The air between them rippled and blurred with the speed of our sensei's passage, and Iwa's jinchuriki leapt back, away from us, to avoid a pack of lightning hounds converging on him at a dead sprint. It seemed Kakashi was worth the hype after all.

"_Suiton: Mizurappa!_"

Unfortunately, there was a reason he'd died the first time around.

Kurotsuchi's water trumpet caught Kakashi mid-leap, and suspended as he was, there was nothing he could do but block the worst of it. The jet of hyper-condensed water hit him dead in the chest, and if his crossed arms prevented any damage, they certainly didn't prevent the technique from throwing him clear across the newly made clearing.

I cast around for the water source she'd drawn from and saw a miniature volcano rising up from the earth behind the Tsuchikage's granddaughter. Earth Rising Excavation. A technique that connected two surfaces - like, say, an underground river to an above ground forest - and forced the bottom surface to rise to the top. Clever.

Kakashi found his feet and his speed sheer moments before Roshi hammered his position with flaming meteors. He appeared on the other side of the forest from us, running through hand seals at a frantic pace. Forcing the Iwa nin to choose between him and us. Which was the priority. Which was the greater threat.

"Run! That's an order!"

It was a gamble, an attempt to attract enough of the heat to give us a chance at escape. A well-reasoned gamble, but a gamble nonetheless.

Kurotsuchi and Roshi exchanged a look. Kurotsuchi made a sharp motion, and the monkey scoffed. Then they broke off, the teenage jonin rushing forward to engage our sensei with two of her tokubetsu jonin in tow while the monkey set his sights on me. I didn't need to look to know that the remaining Iwa nin had come up on our behinds. Sakura's body language said more than enough.

This was it. This was the moment it all went downhill. For all the good my transmigration's knowledge did me, I was back in the same place I'd been before, with only a handful of dead Iwa nin to show for it.

Against Roshi I had been outmatched. Against Roshi and whatever members of his personal team were left, I didn't stand a chance. We'd be dispatched in short order. My chakra reserves had fallen even further than I'd ... _infuriating_.

"Not a bad fight, girlie," Roshi said, coughing charcoal and sulfur into a gloved fist. "Haven't thrown around that much lava that fast in years. Your sensei's a quick one."

I could see it all play out in the clarity of my sharingan's recorded memories. We'd try to fight back, to escape, to do just about anything, with some variations added with my advanced skills in mind. In the end, we'd fall, and Roshi would strike the killing blow. Naruto would take it, would save us, and lose his mind to the demon in his stomach.

They'd fight, jinchuriki against jinchuriki, and Naruto would make something of it. We'd feel some hope. And then the monkey would come out and burn it all to the ground. He'd strike the killing blow, the _real _killing blow, the one Naruto wouldn't be getting up from.

And Kakashi would save him. He'd take it, like Naruto had taken the one before, but he wouldn't have a demon to stand him back up.

Naruto would scream, would cry, would rage, and then Kakashi's last words would pierce his crimson haze. He'd turn away from Iwa's demon, away from revenge, doing in a single second what I could never do and giving up his vengeance for the ones precious to him. He'd throw both of his teammates over his shoulders and blow through the enemy nin, through the Tsuchikage's daughter, deeper into the Land of Rivers. Further from home.

We'd spend the next month wandering from enemy territory to enemy territory, terrified of anything and everything. Just three genin out on their first C-rank mission. Three children searching for home. We'd find it eventually, but it would hurt getting there.

"Alright there, girlie?" Rochi asked. "You're lookin' a bit traumatized."

But... that wasn't quite right, was it? Naruto wasn't here. Not standing with us, trapped.

My lips curled.

No, he was in the caverns. The caverns beneath the earth. The caverns that Kurotsuchi had drawn a volcanic connection from for her technique. A volcanic connection which was lighting up to my eyes with chakra that did not belong to any technique of hers. Chakra that was surging up from the caverns towards the surface.

Rochi noticed it a second too late, following my line of sight to the Earth Rising Excavation. He tensed. "What the-"

Too late. The chakra reached the lip and hurtled into open air, littering the skies with thousands upon thousands of-

Grains of sand?

"What?" I rasped, staring blankly at sands as they blotted out the sun. Where was Naruto? I could see his chakra tinting the world, I could feel him, where was he? "No."

"Sasuke?" Sakura gasped. "Is this-"

"_No!_" I screamed.

The sand fell.

Sakura tackled me to the ground midway through a shunshin, and in the next moment the littlest jinchuriki dropped a sandstorm on the battlefield.

I thrashed against her panicked grip, further damaging my wrist as I drove my fist into her shoulder over and over. She cried out in pain, her voice near inaudible in the sudden howl of the sands as she pleaded with me.

"Stay down, Sasuke! We need to stay-"

I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could.

She flew off me, landing in a stunned heap, and I rolled to my feet. I squinted against the storm, twin tomoe whirling in each eye. It was almost impossible to see through the chakra-saturated sands, but not quite. I could see flickers of foreign chakra, dying flames being snuffed out by the sands.

A panicked shout went up from the chakra signature closest to me, and the sands parted just in time for me to see a cocoon of sand implode with a Iwa nin trapped inside of it. _Sand coffin_.

I turned to the skies, to the upper limits, and I saw him. Crouched atop the lip of the volcano, one hand held aloft, the other gripping his head. His face was a mess of dried blood, I observed with a hint of vicious satisfaction. But he was alive. He was alive and Naruto wasn't _here_.

Our eyes met. Mine blood red and speckled with black tomoe. His a poisonous yellow, centered with four-pointed stars. Ichibi.

The sands surrounding me converged, wrapping around my legs and reaching up for my neck. My chokuto quivered in my white-knuckled grip, and the world dimmed as I stared into the littlest bijuu's murderous eyes. I called upon my chakra, electrified it, and prepared myself for a discharge of the last of my energy and a mad dash to the volcano. Naruto wasn't here and he was, and Amaterasu save me, if I had to die a second time to rip his throat out with my bare teeth-

Gaara closed his eyes and the sand went slack.

I blinked, chest heaving, and followed his line of sight as he turned away from me. I watched another Iwa nin get swept up in the sands just the same as me, and I watched the tendrils engulf him, crush him, and gorge on his blood.

What.

Roshi bellowed his fury to the skies somewhere further in, and in response the Yonbi lit up the sands. A ball of fire and chakra bloomed in front of me, devouring waves of sand and spitting them back out as streams of molten glass. It expanded outward and upward, to the clear skies, before dissipating all at once and revealing the monkey himself crouched in its epicenter, caustic red chakra hissing and bubbling along the surface of his skin.

"_Boy!_" He roared, stomping a foot on the blackened earth. "What the good god damn d'ya think you're doin' to my team!?"

The temperature spiked again, pressing uncomfortably against my skin even from my current distance. Demon locked eyes with demon, and Gaara stared down his senior with complete and utter impassivity. Then he clenched his outstretched fist, ending the life of Roshi's final tokubetsu jonin somewhere off to my left. Roshi growled.

"Boy! I've never killed one o' my own before, but it looks like you're gonna be the first!"

The ground beneath the Iwa jinchuriki cracked and roiled, transforming into something not quite liquid, not quite solid. The demonic chakra coating the monkey like a second skin rippled in time with the earth's contortions, and the air grew ever hotter. Throughout it all, Gaara remained crouched atop Kurotsuchi's volcano, unmoved.

And began to... smile?

Something flashed by me, a flicker of light, and I spun around to follow it. My tomoe spun frantically as they tracked the blur amidst the sands, the billowing flame of a chakra signature. There was too much sand to see, too much to know, but it was too large to be Kakashi's, too bright. Too _orange_.

The orange blur tore through the sands, wound its way around the circle of burnt earth Roshi had carved out, and in a split second parting of the sands I saw him.

My eyes flew open wide, and he leapt out of the sandstorm.

"_Brother!_" Naruto shouted, slamming a familiar wooden gauntlet into Roshi's jaw.

The haymaker threw the monkey clear off his feet, and in the moment he was midair another Naruto came sliding out of the sands, twisting at the waist and kicking up into his gut. He flew up, and another Naruto propelled itself off the first's raised leg and punched him in the nose, flipping him back. Three more clones followed, propelling him higher and higher, until the sands themselves lashed out and seized each of his limbs.

Roshi looked up with groggy eyes, and Naruto bore down with a spiraling sphere.

"_Rasengan!_"

Roshi hit his own molten earth like a comet, disappearing beneath its surface in a spray of lava. Naruto landed on firm ground just outside its range, and then, finally, _finally_, turned to me. He grinned, and my face burned hotter than any yoton technique at the sheer joy in it. He looked like my Naruto again.

Not because of the smile, though it helped. Not because of his looks, either, because he was still the same little boy he'd been before, just like I was the same little girl. No, it was something altogether more obvious.

It was the ink.

Deep red ink that shadowed his eyelids, branching out and framing the undersides of his eyes with two thick lashes of a brushstroke on either side. And on his forehead, beneath the leaf of his headband, I knew there would be a single red dot, enclosed with a circle. His mark of enlightenment. His _sagehood_.

He raised a hand and waved. I blinked. Opened my mouth. Close it.

I waved back.

And the monkey burst free of its molten prison with a furious howl.

"Gaara!" Naruto called, and the sandstorm redoubled. The littlest jinchuriki tore the earth to pieces and broke those pieces down into grains of sand, adding them to the waves.

**_"BOYS!" _**Roshi clawed himself fully from the lava, a single demonic tail writhing behind him. **_"_Enough!_ Enough!"_**

Sand rolled over him, snuffing him out like an unneeded candle, and the cloak of his chakra swelled. Molten glass fell off the monkey in rivulets, but the sand didn't stop. Gaara was tearing the earth apart faster than Roshi could melt it, and the sand kept coming. It whirled around him, condensed, trapping him in a massive sphere of sand that was rapidly filling up with liquid glass.

If he let go of the Yonbi's power Gaara would crush him with the sands. If he didn't, Gaara would drown him.

Roshi chose neither, and another ball of fire consumed Gaara's makeshift prison. The monkey burst through it a moment later, before it had even finished expanding, a second demonic tail joining the first. He rushed toward's Gaara's volcano at a dead sprint, his eyes a violent, pupiless orange.

Naruto appeared in front of him, the real Naruto, and when Roshi lashed out with hands wreathed in lava Naruto was only too happy to meet him.

Jinchuriki met jinchuriki, wood met lava, and the two came together with a muffled boom of chakra and pressure. Their hands locked, each clenching the other tight enough to shatter stone. Roshi snarled, shoving at the much smaller shinobi, but Naruto's grin never left his face. Just turned dangerous.

"You killed a lot of trees, asshole," Naruto said. "Nature's not happy about it. She's not happy at all."

**_"I'll live with it,"_** Roshi growled. **_"But you won't."_**

A flash of color, of searing chakra light in the corner of my eye, struck me like a physical blow. I spun and saw the Tsuchikage's daughter, battered and bleeding but somehow still whole, rising up on another volcano opposite the one Gaara had claimed. It rose, and from its peak mud and sodden earth flowed.

"Naruto!" I cried, and the fool, the _idiot_, tried to jerk back, but Roshi held him firm.

Sand surged across the ruined forest, coiling up the new volcano and reaching up to engulf the Iwa kunoichi. At the same time another sphere of sand rose up to engulf Naruto and Rochi, this time in protection, but the Yonbi's tails lashed out, tearing it open again and again, faster than Gaara could form it.

Kurotsuchi reared her head back and slapped her hands together. The river of mud jumped clear of the volcano, lurching and parting at the end, opening a maw of earthen teeth and _roaring_.

Then Kurotsuchi blew a razor thin stream of flame into the earth dragon and set it alight.

"Shit, shit, shit!" Naruto cursed, yanking against Roshi's grip with all his might. Roots tore their way up from the earth and wrapped around the Yonbi's jinchuriki, but they were already burnt and weeping by the time they broke the lava's surface. The monkey shed them easily.

I stared at the lava dragon as it hurtled through the air, mind curiously blank. Sand rose up like full moon tides to stop it, but it bulled through them without losing a second's momentum. Naruto shouted in frustration, redoubling his efforts, and the earth around their molten circle quaked ominously. It wasn't enough. It was too slow.

My eyes opened very, very wide.

A shunshin took me behind the monkey, putting me directly in the dragon's path. Sand broke around me, flowing up into the waves trying and failing to halt the dragon's progression. I stared up at the dragon unblinkingly, my eyes physically _hurting _from how wide they were, how fast the tomoe in them were spinning.

"You," I whispered, looking past the dragon to the girl behind it. "_You dare_."

My hands trembled, the left gripping my chokuto's hilt until the wood groaned and cracked, my right's fingers digging bloody furrows in my palm. She dared do this to me, now, _now _of all times? She dared attack my Naruto when he couldn't defend himself, when I had just gotten him back? She dared to take him from me again, to turn the elements that I commanded against him?My eyes screamed in agony, the tomoe spinning and multiplying and melting into one. I cried tears of blood as the lava serpent lunged forward to devour us. Furious, _affronted _blood.

She dared to kill the man I loved with _fire?_

Starlight spun in my eyes, and the world sharpened past clarity into something otherworldly. Strength not my own surged through my veins, kicking open tenketsu and filling me with burning, pitch black energy. I called upon all of it, every bit, and urged it away from me. Out, out it went. Every last drop of pitch black starlight.

Black flame exploded from my every tenketsu, every pore of my body, and twisted and whirled into something altogether greater than myself.

Susanoothrew her head back, midnight hair streaming behind her as she greeted the world for the first time, again, with her heavenly cry.

**_"Finally," _**a woman's voice purred. **_"You've kept me waiting-"_**

"Shut _up,_" I hissed. I immersed myself in memories, agonizing memories of cold, slithering things, of corpses and screaming and blood red eyes that for once were not my own. I drowned myself in shame and self-loathing until there was nothing left but the memory of that day. Susanoo latched onto the memory,onto its clarity, and from it she drew strength.

From behind her back Susanoo drew the Heirophant's shield and buried it in the earth between us.

The serpent slammed into the titanic flaming shield with all of Kurotsuchi's combined elemental force, and it was not enough. It broke, shattered, and parted around Susanoo's shield. Rivers of flaming rock flowed, not a single molten drop coming anywhere close to Naruto or his opponent, and the Heirophant's shield stood firm.

I rode the jutsu out to the very end, and only then did Susanoo cast aside her shield. I immersed myself in a different memory, a memory I had never once dwelled on if I could help it. Susanoo seized the memory, and from it drew her strength.

The Fool's wings erupted from her back, vast and feathered by pitch black flames. I looked up, my eyes, _my _eyes, showing me everything I needed to know about the girl from Iwa, and Susanoo beat her wings and soared up into the sky.

Kurotsuchi leapt back, forming another jutsu with panicked seals. Her volcano's surface buckled, expelling half a dozen arrowheads larger than she was at breakneck speeds. Susanoo waved a contemptuous hand, swatting two from the sky and letting the rest pass harmlessly through the billowing panels of her armor.

I hit her with every ounce of strength in my frame, slamming her flat against the lip of her volcano with my knees in her stomach. She arched up, gasping futilely for breath, and I shoved her back down.

"_You,_" I said again, eyes weeping from the strain of my fully matured sharingan and the fact that I hadn't blinked in over a minute. Kurotsuchi thrashed against me, her pink eyes terrified. She reached for a pouch at her thigh, so I grabbed both of her wrists and crushed them against the stone, ignoring the pain of my own broken wrist as I leaned in and hissed.

"You tried to kill the man I love. You tried to kill the man I _love_ with _fire_." The stars in my eyes began to spin. "I'll show you fire, you uppity rock bitch. I'll show you real fire."

**_"Fire blacker than night," _**that same voice said again, dripping with satisfaction. **_"Fire for seven days and seven nights, we'll show you."_**

"P-please," Kurotsuchi gasped. "I-"

_"Amaterasu."_

The Tsuchikage's granddaughter screamed and screamed.

Susanoo took flight, leaving the burning volcano behind. I saw Kakashi as I flew, scorched and bruised and alive, moving away from a pile of Iwa corpses towards Sakura. I dismissed them both as out of harm's way and focused on the monkey, preparing myself for another round.

I needn't have bothered. In the time it had taken me to deal with Kurotsuchi, Naruto had finished calling up the Fool. Or, at least, its hands. They were cupped around the monkey, who in turn was enveloped head to toe in writhing tendrils of sand, locking him up tight. As I watched I could see the demonic chakra being steadily drained from Iwa's jinchuriki and filtered back into the earth, to be used in nourishing the new trees to come.

Susanoo touched down behind the wooden prison, humming her gentle goodbye as she faded away. I held my breath, looking to the top of the Fool's conjoined hands, where my blond sage sat.

Seconds ticked by in excruciating silence, Gaara watching us from the lip of his volcano, Sakura and Kakashi eying us from an even safer distance. Then the last of the Yonbi's chakra drained away and Naruto reached between the Fool's fingers, grabbing the older jinchuriki by his mesh shirt and leaping clear of the molten earth. He dumped the monkey on the ground, and when the sand attempted to consume him he shook his head, looking up at Gaara. He shook his head again, slowly, and the sand retreated.

Then, and only then, did he turn back to me. Then, and only then, did I breathe.

"Sasuke," he said, smiling warmly. I blinked.

**_"Asura."_**

"Naruto," I gasped, crossing the distance between us in a shunshin, unable to be away from him half a second longer.

He opened his arms and caught me in mid air, spinning and laughing without a care in the world. Then he fell onto his behind, the red ink fading from his face for the first time in three days.

"Missed you," he said, resting his forehead against mine, steel against steel. I giggled. Him, miss _me?_

"You idiot," I laughed, grabbing the back of his head and mashing our lips together, warm and wet and _right_. Someone gasped far, far away, but I couldn't care less who or why. We broke for air some pleasant eternity later, and only then did I say the words that had been burning my heart inside out since I'd seen him die. Words that I'd never had the strength to say the first time around.

"I love you, idiot."

His beautiful blue eyes shimmered, and he pulled me as close to him as I could go.

"I know. I love you too, bastard."


	9. Chapter 9

**AN EDIT:** WELP, NEVER MIND. The masses have spoken, and buff manly names it is for Naruto's band of yandere honeys. Please enjoy your regularly scheduled interlude, and ignore this if you didn't see the first version of this chapter. Sorry for the confusion.

* * *

><p>It was a rough time, being Haruno Sakura.<p>

It hadn't always been that way. She hadn't had a troubled upbringing. Aside from a short stint of bullying, which her best friend Ino had saved her from soon after it began, Sakura's troubles had started and ended at getting good grades for as long as she could remember. Her parents were alive and well, and loved her very much. She had friends inside and outside of the shinobi forces, and even the attention of a few boys. Indeed, Sakura had one of the best lives a burgeoning kunoichi could ask for.

Then she graduated. Things had been going downhill ever since.

She'd been looking forward to her genin cell for years. Her parents, both low-ranking shinobi, had filled her head with tales of their genin cells and the bonds they'd forged with their teammates. To hear them tell it, your genin cell was your family, handpicked by the Hokage himself to best compliment your strengths and weaknesses.

Sakura wanted that. She craved that closeness, that bond that went beyond friendship, beyond family. She wanted a team like the legendary InoShikaCho cell, the one that had single handedly united the Yamanaka, the Nara, and the Akimichi as friends. She wanted it bad.

When the time for team assignments had come, she could barely sit still in her seat from excitement. The potential combinations, the sheer possibility of it all, had kept her up through the entirety of the previous night. To think, in the next few moments she'd know who her second family would be, who she'd be sharing the rest of her life's joys and sorrows with.

It was staggering.

When Iruka had called out her name first for Team 7, she'd almost fallen out of her chair. Who was it going to be? Ino? Did she want it to be Ino? Would that be a waste? Would it be better to forge that special bond with someone new? Who was it going to _be?_

Uchiha Sasuke. Rookie of the Year. The coolest beauty the Academy had to offer.

Sakura was over the moon. She'd been trying for years to break through the chilly facade that the Academy's up and comer walled everyone out with, to no avail. But now! Now they were family. Sisters in arms, the two most talented kunoichi of their class. Away from the suffocating atmosphere of the Academy, away from all the boys who tripped over themselves trying to impress her every day, she just knew Sasuke would open up.

She'd wanted to be her friend for so long, and had looked up to her for even longer. It almost didn't matter who their third teammate was. She'd be happy with her team one way or-

Uzumaki Naruto. Dead last. The loudest idiot the Academy had to offer.

She was disappointed. She wouldn't lie. If she could have chosen anyone else in their class to fill that third spot, she'd have done so right then and there. It was harsh, and maybe a little cruel to think of another human being so poorly, but she wanted a family. She wanted friendship, bonds, a deeper understanding than she'd ever experienced with another person.

She didn't want romance. There were few enough boys in the Academy that interested her that way, and Naruto was not one of them. He was loud, obnoxious, and as stupid as they came. A fool, through and through.

If that was all, maybe it would be okay. Her parents had never said that their teammates were perfect, or even that they'd liked them right from the start. Quite the contrary. If Naruto was just a fool, Sakura could look past that. But he wasn't just that. He was also obsessed with her.

She felt cheated. Naruto hadn't even passed the test, and yet here he was, ruining the dynamic of her new family with his sheer presence. It made Team 7 a mixed blessing at best.

Or so she'd thought. God, she'd been so stupid.

Their genin test, the real one, had been the first sign that things were not what she'd thought them to be. Their sensei - another disappointment, showing up late and putting minimal effort into his introduction - had showed them their objective, the two bells, and told them that one of them would have to fail. Right then, she'd made her choice.

Sakura chose Sasuke. Sasuke chose Naruto. Naruto chose them both.

Seeing the dead last flood the training grounds with corporeal, free thinking clones had thrown her apparent knowledge of his skills into question, right from the start. Seeing him coordinate with them, moving with speed and intensity that he'd never shown before, only cemented the notion in Sakura's mind. At the end of the day, though, a jonin was a jonin. No matter how skilled he'd suddenly become, Naruto couldn't take their sensei head on. Not alone.

So Sakura had turned to Sasuke, offered her hand. And that should have been it. That should have been the start, the beginning of the most beautiful friendship Sakura had experienced to date.

But Sasuke had refused. Spit on her offer. Spit on her friendship, and thrown herself in with Naruto.

They'd failed, and Sakura had been tied to a training post as punishment while her teammates ate lunch. She hadn't eaten breakfast, couldn't have eaten breakfast. Sensei had told her not to. So she hung and watched, aching and hungry, while they ate without her.

It wasn't what she wanted. It wasn't what she'd been dreaming of for so very long. They were supposed to be family. Family didn't sit by and eat while family went hungry. Why did Sasuke look so smug? Like this was retribution, like Sakura had done something to deserve this. What had she ever done to her? What-

Naruto poked her, right in the sensitive juncture above her right hip and below her ribs. She yelped, whipped around on him, ready to lash out with every ounce of frustration and disappointment that had been building in her since she'd been assigned to this team.

He offered her a fishcake.

As it turned out, that was their team's dynamic in a nutshell.

Neither of her teammates were anything like she'd expected. She'd been right in thinking that Sasuke would open up outside of the Academy, but that was all she'd been right in. Seeing Sasuke for who she really was didn't make befriending her any easier. It was the opposite. The girl that emerged from the impassive shell of the last Uchiha was far more poisonous, and far colder than she ever could have imagined.

Except when Naruto was involved. Whenever the dead last was around, talking and laughing and smiling like the sun, Sasuke melted. Sakura hadn't believed it the first time she noticed the shift in demeanor, the tenderness in her expression as she watched the boy of their team try to beat Kakashi in a one-armed tree climbing contest. She hadn't believed it the second time either. But after a certain point, she'd been forced to accept it. Sasuke preferred Naruto over her, by a wide margin.

It was depressing. She cried herself to sleep the night she finally admitted it to herself, and stayed home feeling sorry for herself the next day. Or rather, she would have if a certain fool hadn't come barging through her window at half past noon.

And that was the supreme irony of it all. Sasuke had shed her Academy persona and turned out to be a girl Sakura couldn't even call a friendly acquaintance, let alone family. Naruto had done the same, shed his own facade, and turned out to be...

More.

She hadn't trusted it at first. The friendly smiles, the spirited encouragements, the simple kindness of him. It was all so platonic. It was everything she wanted, but it wasn't Naruto. She couldn't do anything with Naruto without it turning into some desperate attempt at romance. She knew this. She'd learned. Naruto was never nice for the sake of being nice.

Except he was. She'd spent weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for anything, really. But it never came. As far as she could tell, he just liked her.

It made her smile. It made her feel warm inside to see his eyes light up when she saw her. When it was just the two of them and their sensei, Sakura felt like she could have that genin cell her parents promised her. If only she put in a little effort to be better to Naruto, she could grasp it.

But that was the problem. It was hardly ever just them.

And as she watched Sasuke leap into his arms and seal their lips together amidst a field of lava and corpses, she realized it might never be again.

"Sakura?"

"Ah!" She jumped, eyes fluttering against the exhaustion weighing them down. It had been a few days since she'd had a decent night's sleep, and not just because of the memory of her teammates embracing one another so tenderly while she watched. On the outside. Alone.

"You don't have to keep watching them," Kakashi said, tapping her with his book. "Your sensei can do some things himself, you know?" Sakura hesitated, glancing back at her teammates.

They'd fallen asleep as soon as the fight was over. Just collapsed to the ground, Sasuke sprawled across Naruto's chest, happy as could be. It had been two days since then.

As if that wasn't bad enough, they couldn't even get to them. The boy from Suna, the terrifying killer that had dragged Naruto down into the caverns and almost stopped her heart in the process, wouldn't let them go. Sakura had sprinted to them, past the lava, past the corpses and the unconscious monster that Naruto had trapped with mokuton - _how could he use mokuton?_ - and then the boy had grabbed her.

She'd been wrapped up by fingers of sand thicker around than her waist and hurled clear across the field. If Kakashi hadn't caught her in midair, she didn't know how far she'd have flown.

Kakashi had asked the psychopath to let their teammates go, so that they might care for them. His response?

"You are not his best friends."

She could have screamed.

So here they were, taking a short break from their trek back to Konoha for water and rations. Team 7, the chunin and his client, and the monster from Suna. Sakura wasn't sure who she wanted to strangle first. Or harder.

"I know, sensei," she finally said, slumping in defeat. All the same, her eyes remained glued to Naruto's sleeping form, obscured as it was by the sand and Sasuke. "It's just... They've been asleep for so long, and he won't let us help them-"

"I gave them water."

_Shut up shut up shut up I will **end you.**_ She glared murder at Naruto's self-proclaimed best friend, crushing her unappetizing rations bar to an even more unappetizing paste. He stared back at her, unfazed.

Kakashi rubbed her shoulder in soothing little circles until she let the rations paste go. He handed her another one, unwrapped. "Chakra exhaustion always hits the hardest your first time," he explained in patient tones. "I wouldn't be surprised if they slept for another day or two, with what they were throwing around at the end, there."

"He isn't chakra exhausted."

Kakashi tilted his head, playful brown eye going flat as he turned it on the boy from Suna. He'd allowed the foreign nin to tag along. If Sakura had to guess, mostly because his sand was so horrifically fast and strong, and currently wrapped around two members of their team. But that didn't mean he had any more affection for the boy than she did.

"What makes you think that?"

The boy frowned, glancing down at the entwined genin in front of him. "When we fought, I felt a portion of his strength. It was incomprehensible. Greater than mother's, and then some. And there was more of it, locked away, that he had no use for."

He shrugged, taking a bite out of his own rations. "Chakra exhaustion implies a limit to one's strength. I don't know that he has one."

Was she dreaming? Was this entire mission some elaborate prank? How could he be talking about Naruto, and how could she be almost believing him? Had someone pitched this scenario to her on graduation day and told her it would be her reality in the span of a month, she'd have laughed in their face. It was just so baffling.

Sasuke shifted in her sleep, burying her face in the crook of Naruto's neck.

All of it.

Naruto twitched, raising a hand and brushing ineffectually at his affectionate hanger on. He moved a few locks of her hair away from his neck, hand drifting down to slap her lightly in the face when that didn't move her. Sakura giggled, shoving a bite of rations into her mouth to cover up her smile.

Then Sasuke's brow furrowed, and she caught one of his fingers in her mouth, stopping the slaps short.

_All of it._

"Young lady," their client said, perpetually nervous since the events that had put her teammates under. "Are you, ah, quite alright?"

She turned, and he quailed at the look she gave him. She swallowed her 'food' and opened her mouth to give him the most transparent reassurance of her life, and then she heard Naruto groan.

"Naru-!" she cried, only to be stopped short by her sensei's arm between herself and her teamates. Kakashi held a finger up to his face mask, pointing to the psychotic nin from Suna. Sakura fell silent.

The boy was trembling. His eyes were wide as he watched her teammate, her friend, claw his way back to the waking world. And as Sakura watched, his eyes began to shift and warp, pupils breaking down and reforming into four-pointed stars. Different from the ones she'd seen in Sasuke's eyes, but no less monstrous. The green in them faded, a poisonous yellow bleeding in and taking their place.

He raised a shaking hand, fingers half-clenched, towards the sleeping genin. The sands enveloping them stilled for the first time in two days, and Sakura's heart kicked right over a beat. Kakashi remained as still as the sands, ready to move.

Naruto cracked an eye open.

"Fuckin' senjutsu hangovers," he muttered. Deep blue irises swiveled, taking in his surroundings. He paused when he caught sight of her, and that same warmth gripped her as he did his best to smile. He stopped at Gaara, taking in his monstrous eyes and the tension in his body.

"Don't give me that look, Gaara."

The boy, Gaara, gasped like he'd been thrown into Snow Country's frozen sea. His fingers flew apart, and with them went the sand, scattering from Sakura's teammates in thousands of harmless grains. Kakashi disappeared from her side and appeared between Naruto and Gaara in a crouch.

"Hey, Kakashi."

"Naruto."

"You've got some questions for us, huh?"

"I do."

"Great." Naruto grimaced, attempting to sit up. When that didn't work, he looked down, finally noticing Sasuke on his chest. Sasuke, on his chest, languidly sucking on his index finger. He blinked. "Could have sworn she stopped doing that."

She was going to have a stroke. Sakura was thirteen years old, and she was going to have a stroke.

"Need some help?" Kakashi asked, already reaching down and gripping Sasuke under her arms. Naruto jerked up.

"Wait don't-"

Kakashi yanked his hands back, just in time to avoid the unconscious girl's blind stab. Naruto sighed, relieved.

"Yeah, don't do that." He folded Sasuke's hand into his own, running his thumb in a little spiral along her palm until her grip on the kunai loosened enough for him to take it. "She doesn't like getting woken up."

"You can't just lay there!" Sakura blurted. "We- we'll be moving soon, so you need to get up." Up and away from her.

"I will carry them," Gaara declared, but Naruto waved him off.

"Nah, I can do it. Maybe." He wrapped his arms around his hanger on and formed a cross with both hands. "Let's see if this still works."

A clone appeared standing beside them in a burst of smoke, already running through hand seals of its own. "On three, boss," it said. Naruto nodded gravely. "One, two-" Both versions of her teammates flickered, vanishing in a cloud of chakra smoke. Body replacement.

"Three!"

Sasuke stabbed him in the eye.

The clone yelped and dispersed with an echoing pop, and Sasuke fell the remaining half a foot to the ground. Her eyes snapped open, black and bleary, and trained themselves on the original.

"Ow, god!" Naruto, meanwhile, doubled over and clutched his eye. Phantom pain? "Why is it always the eyes with you? Every damn-"

He stumbled forward as Sasuke deposited herself on his back, wrapping her arms around his neck and setting her chin on his shoulder. He grumbled and propped her up, hands settling comfortably beneath her thighs. She smirked, dark eyes hooded.

"I don't trust your clones," she told him.

"Come on! That was years ago. Clone on the left apologized, didn't he?"

Sasuke cocked an eyebrow. "Did he? Was that him?"

He scowled. "Look, it doesn't matter which clone it was. It was a clone, and they apologized."

"Hn." She smiled faintly, eyes drifting shut, and kissed his neck.

"Guys," Sakura hissed. The client was watching, and so was the chunin tagalong. And Gaara. And her. The only one pointedly not watching them was Kakashi.

Naruto tilted his head. "What's up, Sakura?"

"You can't-" She stopped herself. Breathed. Tried again. "I don't know what's going on between you two, and it's none of my business either way-" The words tasted like bile and felt like failing a test. "-but you can't just do that while we're on a mission!"

Naruto had the grace to look sheepish, but Sasuke just hummed and kissed his neck again.

"Why not?"

Why not? _Why not?_ "It's not professional! This is our job, and he's our teammate! You can't just be- be-" All over him! With him! _Together._

"Sakura," Sasuke murmured. "I am being professional. As soon as we get back to Konoha, I'm going to do things to our teammate that you couldn't find in the most depraved volume of Hatake's books. Unspeakable things, Sakura. This is nothing."

This was a prank. This was all a horrible, horrible prank, and they were all going to the Shinigami's stomach for it.

"Sasuke, stop," Naruto ordered. "Be a little considerate. She's thirteen."

_We're all thirteen!_

"Fine. She can sit in the corner and watch."

This bitch.

* * *

><p>It was a good time, being Hatake Kakashi.<p>

It hadn't always been that way. He'd endured more than his fair share of trials in life, even for a shinobi of his renown with his list of battles fought and won. He'd trudged through the crucibles of the Third Great Shinobi War, the deaths of Team 7 - his family, in the wake of his father's inglorious suicide - and the years upon bloody years of service in ANBU. Every one had changed him, and not quite for the better. Yet here he was. At the end of the road, with warmth in his breast and a smile on his lips.

Kakashi had always wanted a Team 7 to call his own.

His coworkers had never believed him, of course. How could you ever be a jounin sensei, they asked. You've been on the fast track your whole life, taking on solo missions that a full platoon of sane ANBU wouldn't touch with a ten foot bo staff since you were a preteen, they said. You don't even like kids, they insisted.

In the face of all that well-reasoned opposition, there was really only one thing for him to do. Go out and request a team from the Academy's next graduating class. Kakashi was fairly sure he'd taken more time off of Asuma's life than all his cigarettes combined when he'd told him.

They failed miserably. Kakashi had been so insulted by their performance that he'd retroactively changed them from Team 7 to Team 6.5 in his notice of rejection, because they didn't deserve to share that moniker with history's greatest genin cells. Even if it was only for a day. _Especially _if it was only for a day.

The Hokage hadn't been amused, but had approved the name change along with the rejection. He'd had his own Team 7 once, after all. He understood the feeling.

His coworkers pointed to the incident the next time he brought up his desire for a genin cell. How can you be a sensei when you failed a dream team like that, they asked. You got the Rookie of the Year and the two runners up, they said. You've gotten so used to dealing with elite shinobi, you probably wouldn't even be able to tolerate a team of veteran chuunin, they insisted.

So Kakashi tried again. They were so much worse that he didn't even bother changing their moniker to a number. He dubbed them Team Losers and accepted the next available suicide mission to blow off some steam.

The Hokage didn't comment on the name change after reading Kakashi's report. They really had been that awful.

He kept trying. Kakashi was nothing if not persistent, and it wasn't like he was beyond his prime - or even in it yet, really. He had time. He could wait for his Team 7 to show themselves.

His coworkers said he was being unreasonable. They said his standards were too unreasonable. He knew it wasn't true, though. He was a simple shinobi with simple tastes.

All he wanted was a team that would change the world. The next generation's movers and shakers, the three shinobi and kunoichi that would break the world as Kakashi knew it down and mold it like putty in their hands. Reshape it, rebuild it, into something beyond anything Kakashi's generation could ever imagine. He wanted the legends.

That's ridiculous, his coworkers said. The world's lucky to get a single shinobi like that _once _in a given generation, let alone three. To get all three in the same graduating year, in the same village, in the same _team? _Get the fuck out of my face, Kakashi, they said.

Then it happened. That fateful day, a month ago, it happened.

He hadn't had high hopes, going into it. The Hokage had insisted, as one past member of Team 7 to another, that this group of kids was the real deal. He'd told Kakashi that this was the closest he was ever going to get to the genin cell of his dreams. But still, he'd been skeptical.

How wrong he'd been. The second he'd started the bell test, he'd seen it. He'd seen the _potential _in them, the same potential Minato-sensei had seen in his team. The same potential Jiraiya-sama, the Hokage, and the Nidaime had all seen in their own teams. The potential to change the world.

Naruto and Sasuke fought like shinobi and kunoichi far beyond their years. They fought like heroes and demons forged in the same flames that had melted Kakashi down and reshaped him into the man he was today. Like true veterans of war. They fought at the very limits of their capabilities, pushing themselves to the brinks of their capacities from the very first second. They had no need to pace themselves, and certainly no desire for it.

They fought hard, fast, and _clumsy _in the best possible way. Like they were already full grown, already legends, trapped in the bodies of Academy graduates. Like they were mad about it, and they wanted _out_.

Kakashi adopted them into Team 7 the second he saw them move.

Sakura was a harder sell. Where her teammates exploded off the page, proving the Academy reports on both of them to be false from second one, Sakura had hesitated. It was clear that Naruto and Sasuke's performance surprised her just as much as it did Kakashi, but while he immediately took it in stride, she never quite recovered from it. Kakashi ended up tying her to the log.

At the end of the day, though, he'd accepted her into Team 7's fold all the same. She was a hard sell, but Kakashi had always been skilled at looking underneath the underneath. She'd get there.

The only flaw in his shiny new team was their dynamic with one another. Kakashi was no social butterfly, something his coworkers could all attest to, but even he knew a dysfunctional set of personalities when he saw them.

From the way she acted, Sakura seemed to have spent her years in the Academy with the talentless idiot and withdrawn prodigy that their records described Naruto and Sasuke as, and not with the people that they'd actually turned out to be. She acted like she was walking on eggshells around Naruto, and one wrong step could shatter the boy's friendly demeanor irreparably. She'd treated Sasuke like some long lost sister at first, doing her best to spend time with her at their third teammate's expense, but as time went on she seemed to be drifting away from the icy Uchiha girl, drawn to the flame that was the Uzumaki of the team. Becoming resentful of Sasuke's bite.

From the way Sasuke acted, you'd think Sakura had been the one to slaughter her family and not her older brother. Kakashi hadn't seen a girl with such contempt for another human being since he'd killed that noble's newly-wed son mid-coitus with his wife. He imagined it would have been quite unsettling if the Uchiha girl in question didn't look so darn cute trying to flay Sakura with her eyes. As for Naruto... well. It hadn't clicked until he'd taken them to the Valley of the End and told the story of its creation, but her treatment of him was rather historically familiar.

As it turned out, the fool with no friends turned out to be the glue that held the whole mess together, if only just. Naruto treated Team 7 like he'd known them all his whole life, and loved them for just as long. The depth of his affection was frankly a little off-putting, and had inspired more than a few Obito-related nightmares since his induction into the team. Still, Kakashi wouldn't trade him for the world, and as time went on, his other two cute little students were beginning to realize that they wouldn't, either.

He had to admit. There was something intensely cathartic in watching sensei's son heal Team 7 of its many angsts and traumas, just like his father had done for Kakashi's own cell so many years ago.

Yes, Kakashi couldn't be happier with his Team 7. He wanted them to go the distance, and knew with the right guidance that they would. Which was why he here, now, standing outside of the tent Naruto and Sasuke had decided to share on the trip back to Konoha. Because things had happened, and as their sensei, he needed to talk to them about it.

He was tolerant of a lot of things, but students keeping secrets from their sensei was not one of them.

"I'm coming in," he called, shifting the tent's flap aside and ducking in.

He found Naruto sitting cross-legged in the middle of the small shelter, hair hanging free over his eyes while he polished his headband. Sasuke was resting on her knees behind him, arms wrapped loosely around his waist while she whispered sweet nothings in his ear.

Oh my. Maybe not-so-sweet nothings. If he had any shame, his cheeks sure would be burning right now.

But he didn't. "Icha Icha is more depraved than that, you know."

Sasuke blinked, slowly looking up at him. Then down at Naruto. "Really?"

Naruto hummed in agreement. "You read the child-friendly issues, for the brats that are _technically _adult shinobi, but not really. Those are just the tip of the perverted iceberg." Sasuke frowned, considering this.

"Right." She clenched her fists, a schoolgirl's determined glint in her eyes. "I'll try harder."

"I wish you wouldn't," he said. Then, to Kakashi, "It's time to talk, huh?"

He nodded, sitting himself down and letting the tent's flap close behind him. "Sasuke promised me a few answers the other day, and I'm sure you've got some things you'd like to tell me yourself." He phrased it as a suggestion, but Naruto saw underneath the pleasant underneath of his tone and sighed, nodding.

Another thing he liked about these two. They ran with his bullshit. Most jounin he knew couldn't do that.

"Where should we start?" Naruto asked, while Sasuke went back to whispering very-much-not-sweet nothings in his ear.

"How about the mission?" he suggested. Kakashi was a patient man. He could wait for the real juicy secrets. Those were always the best after a filling meal of unimportant nonsense.

"That works." Naruto gave his headband one last once over, satisfied, and tied it back over his forehead. Then he looked Kakashi dead in the eye - another thing most jounin weren't capable of - and told him, "The client's an ass."

"A very polite ass," Kakashi agreed. He'd assumed as much as soon as they'd stumbled upon the man and heard the parameters of his mission.

"The Wind Daimyo got greedy," Naruto explained. "Turns out he was using Miura to shop around for a better deal than Konoha was giving him for his missions. Met with a bunch of representatives from the Great Hidden Villages, even a few satellites villages. All while he had a Konoha team on hand, guarding him. Tatsuno's team never noticed. Can you believe it?"

Kakashi wanted to say he couldn't. He really did. But he'd been dealing with the incompetence of chuunin since he was six years old, and the idiocy of civilians for even longer.

"Anyway, he said the wrong thing to the Iwa representative, and they sent that team of chuunin after him to do... something. I don't know what they were thinking, to be honest. Kill him so the Wind Daimyo keeps giving us his business? Try to ransom back a minor noble the Daimyo has a dozen carbon copies of?" Naruto shrugged.

"Suna caught wind of it and sent Gaara's team to nab him, maybe intimidate him into putting a good word in for them, I don't know. When Iwa realized their team hadn't checked back in when they should have, they upped the ante and sent Kurotsuchi's team. She ended up running into Roshi's team on her way out of the country and enlisted him just in case things were more dire than the Tsuchikage had thought."

"And here we are," Sasuke murmured. Naruto chuckled, leaning back into her embrace.

"Here we are. Any questions?"

"No, that's about what I was expecting." Kakashi sighed, scratching the bridge of his nose. "The Daimyo's been pushing Hokage-sama for better rates since last year. We thought something like this might happen."

"Right. So, what's next?"

"Let's go with how you knew that," Kakashi decided.

"Yeah, about that." Naruto reached up to rub the back of his neck, was intercepted by Sasuke, and directed towards brushing her hair instead. "I don't really know how to say this in a way that won't make you think I'm a plant, or crazy, or-"

"We're from the future," Sasuke cut in, rolling her eyes at the look Naruto gave her. "You were taking too long."

"I was trying to think of the right way to put it! We need him to believe us, we can't just _say_-"

"That would explain it," Kakashi said thoughtfully.

Naruto froze. "What."

"You two haven't been doing a very good job at being thirteen years old," Kakashi said. "Even thirteen year old prodigies. You have all the tells of veteran nin, and high rank ones at that. Watching you interact with one another, and more recently, fight-" He chuckled good-naturedly. "Well, it wasn't hard to see underneath _that _underneath."

When it became clear that Naruto was too stunned to pick things back up, and Sasuke was too preoccupied with one-upping Icha Icha's filthier dialogues to care, he decided to confirm another suspicion of his.

"Sakura isn't the same, is she?"

"She'd better not be," Sasuke said darkly.

"Sasuke," Naruto said sternly. "Friendship." She scoffed but didn't elaborate, resting her chin sullenly on his shoulder.

"So it's just you two," Kakashi mused. "Unless I'm from the future as well. But I'm fairly certain that's not the case." Naruto coughed at that, eyes going shifty. Oh?

"Yeah," his cute little student muttered. "You, uh, sort of died a couple days ago, the first time around."

Well. That was morbid.

Naruto opened his mouth, hesitated, and nudged Sasuke, giving her a meaningful look. She shrugged in response, uncaring. He groaned. "You really believe us?" he asked. "I wasn't expecting you to believe us."

"I'll need a full debrief before we move on from here, obviously," Kakashi said, eye quirking. "But from what I've seen of you two recently, I'm open to the idea. I certainly can't think of a more reasonable explanation."

"We could be plants," Sasuke suggested.

"_Sasuke._"

"Plants that possess a functioning pair of sharingan and the Kyuubi?" Kakashi asked, raising an eyebrow. "The former might be possible, if it were a _very good _plant, but not so much the latter. Naruto wasn't allowed outside the village gates prior to his graduation, so a theoretical plant would have had to infiltrate the village, kidnap him, break the Yondaime's seal, extract the Kyuubi, and then seal it into themselves without anyone being the wiser."

Sasuke thought it over. "Could have been Orochimaru."

"Sasuke, _shut up_."

"Possible," Kakashi accepted. "But highly unlikely. I've seen the Yondaime's seal, and had it explained to me by Orochimaru's teammate. I don't understand even a fraction of its workings, and some of it was even beyond him. It may well be the most complex bit of fuuinjutsu ever conceived."

Naruto nodded along, whiskers twitching with a prideful little grin. "Mom and dad went all out."

Kakashi relaxed. "Oh, good. You know. I was wondering if I should just come out with it." Which brought up a question he probably should have asked at the start of the conversation. "How old are the two of you?"

"Nineteen," Sasuke said.

"Eighteen."

"And why did you decide to come back?" Another question he should have asked already.

"I died," Naruto said. He didn't seem particularly broken up about it, but there was a certain melancholy about him. Like something involved in his death had bummed him out, if not the event itself.

"So did I," Sasuke added.

"I'm sorry," Kakashi said, and he meant it. Dead or not, he couldn't imagine his future self had wanted anything but the best for his students. Just like his present self. "What happened?"

They shared a look. "It's a long story," Naruto began. "And we're not sure how much we're supposed to tell you."

"Oh?"

"We didn't exactly go back by ourselves. Someone sent us, and before we transmigrated, he warned us not to cause... _ripples_." Naruto paused, struggling with the words. "Basically, he said that this whole thing was about changing ourselves, becoming good enough to face what killed us the first time around. Not changing the past."

"Not changing the past," Kakashi repeated. "As in, not saving my life?"

"Exactly," Sasuke agreed.

"Okay, look," Naruto said, spreading his hands. "Do you want to be dead, Kakashi? Is that what you'd prefer?"

He thought about it. A month ago, when his life was what it was and his mythical Team 7 seemed so distant and unattainable, he might have said yes. But now? "I'd say no."

"That's what I thought. Anyway, if you being alive causes ripples, we'll deal with them. I'd deal with them twice if it meant you getting another chance," Naruto said. "But I don't want to make things worse if I don't have to."

"That, and he's embarrassed of me," Sasuke added.

"_You _should be embarrassed of you."

"What did she do?" Kakashi asked. "It can't be so bad that my knowing about it would change things, can it?"

Sasuke smirked.

"She's not doing it again," Naruto said firmly. "That's all you need to know."

"What about-"

"Sasuke, no."

"Sasuke, _yes_."

"Don't make me bring clone on the left into this," Naruto warned. Her smirk turned predatory.

"Do it. I dare you."

"Mah, mah," Kakashi said, waving a placating hand. "Let's not get hasty. There's only so much room in this tent, and we're just having a friendly little chat." They didn't seem convinced. Best change the subject. "We'll come back to the touchy bits of your future later. For now, tell me about those abilities you put on display back there. How did you come into them?"

Naruto hesitated, looking to Sasuke. For once, she met him with equal solemnity. "Should we tell him?" he asked.

"Do you think he deserves to know?" she asked.

Naruto glanced his way. Kakashi considered putting his many infiltration skills to use and assuming a compassionate, trustworthy front, but decided against it at the last moment. There was no telling how skilled these two were in what fields, and a shift in his demeanor that extreme would likely tip them off to the untruth of such a gesture anyway.

That, and... well. Maybe he was getting soft. He just didn't have it in him to lie to sensei's son like that.

Naruto smiled. "He does."

Sasuke hummed. "Then tell him."

They told him.

* * *

><p>It was an interesting time, being Orochimaru of the Legendary Three.<p>

It had always been that way. Admittedly, it came in waves. His early childhood, before his parents had been brutally murdered on the road by a group of unruly bandits, had been occupied by academics but little else. His time in Konoha's Academy had taken that several steps further, sparking a yet lasting interest in ninjutsu and its boundless depths. His genin team had been a chore in the beginning, but had picked up with the Second Great Shinobi War. The peace that followed had been dull, but had been followed soon enough by the Third Great War.

Interesting pursuits came and went. It wasn't until soon after his exile from Konoha, though, that things became _truly _engaging. Not until a woman thought long dead, a legend that outstripped his own in near every way, came to him with a request that changed everything.

Well, he supposed calling it a request was rather generous. He could have refused, but his life immediately after wouldn't have been pleasant. Luckily, he hadn't wanted to.

Uchiha Madara had offered him the knowledge of the Nidaime Hokage's Edo Tensei and the true immortality he'd been chasing for so many years. In exchange for the former, she demanded he resurrect her when she died. If he did so, she promised to give him the latter.

Naturally, he was suspicious. Why did she need him to resurrect her from death if she had the key to immortality? Who was to say she wouldn't just kill him once he'd fulfilled his end of the bargain?

He didn't dare ask either of these things when she was so close and he was so painfully mortal, of course. But she gleaned it from his demeanor anyway. Apparently, she'd only recently found the path to eternal life and was no longer in the proper shape to walk it. She was past her prime, she explained, and while she could still swat flies like Orochimaru in her sleep, immortality was another matter entirely. She'd need all her strength to achieve it.

At the end of the day, he'd agreed, fearing for his life more than anything else. But the curious seed she'd planted in him stayed, and as the years passed, it began to bud.

He chased immortality for over a decade. Joined Madara's adopted Akatsuki, left it, and created his own village in the time it took him to realize that true immortality was something he just couldn't manage on his own. He'd tried everything. _Everything_.

Immortal was a word that was passed around more than all of the filthiest diseases Tsunade accused Jiraiya of having, but Orochimaru had never once encountered true eternal life. Oh, there were approximations. Techniques and bloodlines abound that enhanced durability, longevity, and vitality beyond the average mortal's wildest dreams.

But they had _limits_. There was always a loophole, always a method to be exploited. And the most infuriating part of it all was that they didn't cover their respective weaknesses. It was always the same old fracture point. The same old mortality. It was suffocating.

So here he was, over a decade later. Honoring his end of a bargain he'd done his best to forget since the day he'd made it.

Well. In spirit, at any rate. Physically, the Orochimaru that was currently resurrecting the most infamous kunoichi in history was just a corpse being animated by his chakra- one of the more useful techniques he'd taken from his time in Akatsuki.

The cave he'd chosen to resurrect her in was dark, dank, and made no more pleasant by the corpse he'd dumped onto its stones. A voluptuous woman from Kumo's forces, with long black hair and equally dark eyes made glassy by her abrupt death. Madara had told him that compatibility between hosts was key for the Edo Tensei, though Orochimaru hadn't noticed any appreciable difference in his past experiments. Still, in case there was, he'd gone along with it.

Best not to make her any more upset than she'd already be for being made to wait however many years it had been since her death.

Orochimaru's puppet, bearing his features and a good portion of his chakra, uttered the words and formed the seals while he provided the energy. At the final gesture, the stone beneath the woman's corpse shuddered and broke apart, swallowing her whole.

The cave's foundations groaned and rocked, writhing with Orochimaru's chakra as he reached past the bounds of life and death, beyond the Shinigami, into the Pure World. Reach, gripping, and _tearing_.

From its depths came the most powerful woman to ever grace the shinobi world. From its depth came Uchiha Madara.

From its depths came a coffin.

The rose through the stone, an unsettling silence about it as it forced its way to the surface. It came up horizontal, rather than vertical like all the rest of Orochimaru's experiments had. He didn't know why.

How interesting.

The coffin settled itself silently, and for a long minute was still. Orochimaru's puppet watched with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. Meanwhile, the real Orochimaru's blood thundered through his veins, beads of sweat gathering where his hair met the back of his neck. He wasn't there, not really, but he was close enough. Close enough to maintain the technique, and close enough to be tracked down if she could find his trail.

It had been so long since he'd felt anything vaguely resembling fear. The last time he could remember was his fight with Hanzo the Salamander. It was almost a novel experience.

It was almost... exciting.

The coffin's lid cracked, split clean down the middle, and fell apart in two pieces. Orochimaru shivered.

No. It was _invigorating_.

A hand rose up from inside, slender, strong, and adorned with pitch black nails. It gripped the coffin's edge, knuckles white, and then the woman's aura hit Orochimaru's puppet. It staggered back, serpentine eyes wide, and from afar Orochimaru felt his lips twitching into the beginnings of a smile.

Then, from the coffin, came a soft, trembling hiss.

"_Wryyyyyyy..._"

From its depths came a woman, slumping onto the edge of the coffin, like the kunoichi he'd sacrificed but not. Her hair was the same glossy black, her skin the same ivory white, but the screaming danger in her posture was different. The rasp of her breath, the blood gushing through her veins, it was all wrong. And the chakra. The _chakra_.

Uchiha Madara opened her eyes. They were violet, with no whites to them. Just violet, ringed by concentric circles.

"I've upheld my end of things," Orochimaru's puppet said, after he'd forced his control through the terror that had seized its voice. "Now it's your turn."

Madara didn't respond. His puppet twitched.

"Before you try anything untoward, you should know that this isn't my true form. Should you kill the me you see, I'll only flee. I wouldn't recommend tracking me down, either. My grasp over the Edo Tensei is somewhat limited, so if I die, I'm afraid you'll-"

"_Naruto..._" Madara whispered, locking eyes with him.

Orochimaru cut the connection.

He spent the next week running as fast as he could back to Oto. He didn't waste a moment resting. He ran, and he pondered, and he ran some more. He examined their brief encounter over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, to insanity, until it had been burned permanently into his memory. Then he wondered.

Orochimaru only knew one Naruto of any note, and the last time he'd seen him had been in sensei's office, swaddled in cloth with the Yondaime's ink fresh on his stomach.

He smiled widely.

How very _interesting_.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: <strong>By the by, I promised someone I would notice them a while ago, and it's finally time to deliver. If you're enjoying my stupidity and you haven't read _Uzumaki _yet, it's time to go give Almost Electric's profile a visit! Her Naru/fem!Sasu story was what got me hooked on the pairing in the first place, and what inspired me to write my own take on it when I couldn't find any others. You may well enjoy her story more than mine, so I'd recommend reading both. Just don't stop reading mine, whatever you do.

... Please.


	10. Chapter 10

It takes a special kind of zen to invite someone into your head.

A monk might spend their whole life searching for supreme enlightenment and never find it. Call it a trick of nature, call it luck of the draw, but some people just aren't aware of themselves in the way you need to be to dive into your own mind. Hell, some people can't even keep track of their feelings. Compare that to the self-understanding you need to walk the halls of your own mind and it's no wonder they never make it past step one. Chakra makes things easier - sometimes - but it's not a guarantee. Every mind is unique.

Achieving that precarious state of self-awareness that wavers between narcissism and ignorance is a pretty big deal. Going further than that and inviting someone else into your own head space? The sheer mental control you'd need is out of this world.

Or maybe it isn't. I'm no Yamanaka, and even though this kind of thing feels like it should be difficult, I've managed well enough. It took time to perfect and nature did most of the work for me, but I still did it. Maybe inviting someone to poke around in your thoughts and feelings is easier than confronting them for yourself. Maybe all it takes is a little relaxation and some clever use of chakra. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

"Whatever it is," I muttered. "Looks like I've still got it."

I stretched, basking in the quasi-sensations of my inner mind. Nature's taste was thick in the air, along with copper and other things. The sound of rustling leaves was everywhere, and so was the touch of the breeze that came with them. In spite of everything else, the transmigration hadn't changed this place. There was comfort here.

I dropped down from the same tree I always woke up in, twisting and rubbing sensation into tender limbs as best I could. Then I set off through the forest, striding with purpose to its edge.

Gaara came to on the outskirts of the forest just as I was stepping out of it. Right on place, right on time. I knelt beside him as he struggled for a place in my head, eyes moving frantically behind clenched lids. A few more moments of fighting and his eyes snapped open, wide and mystified. His body jerked, limbs spasming, like he was trying to move for the first time.

"Hey, easy," I said, steadying him. He looked up at me.

"Naruto?" he asked, voice hushed.

"That's me."

"You're-" He cut himself off, the wonder in him giving way to shock.

I blinked. "Hey, you okay? What's wrong?"

"You're... older," he said.

I laughed. "Yeah, it's- well, it's hard to explain. This place is my subconscious brought to life, right? That includes me. So this-" I waved a hand at my eighteen year old frame. "-is what I look like on that level of things, I guess." It was a clumsy explanation, but at least it wasn't entirely wrong.

His eyes flickered over me, pupils dilating just a bit. "And the blood?"

Ah. "We all bleed a little on the inside. Don't worry about it," I said, offering him a hand up. "Focus on yourself for now. I'm doing what I can to help, but it's on you to hold it together while we walk."

"Walk?" Gaara echoed, taking it. My grip was slick with blood, but I pulled him up with little enough effort.

"Walk," I affirmed, letting him go. He staggered under his own weight, struggling for balance and consciousness. I reached out to steady him-

"No," he snapped. "I can... I can do this." He held himself still, frozen in concentration. He breathed. As the seconds ticked on, his form solidified itself in my mind's eye. His hair brightened from fuzzy rose to vivid crimson and his skin flushed with real, living color. He sighed, and there was clarity to the sound where there hadn't been before.

I clapped him on the shoulder, delighted. "Proud of you."

We started walking.

"Why do we have to walk?" he asked a moment later. "Couldn't we have started there?"

"We could have," I agreed, shooting him a wry look. "But showing up with you coming apart at the seams wouldn't have made for a great first impression. Besides, you said you wanted to get to know me better, right?" Gaara contemplated that, looking as if he wanted to say something. He settled for a nod. "Then follow me."

I walked him through my mind, pointing out the details I thought were worth noticing along the way- mostly the really interesting looking trees and whatever wildlife we happened to run across. The phantom sun sat at its apex, lighting our way with noontime rays. We walked the dirt path that drove through the district into the village beyond, and when we reached its end I led him into the maze of high rise apartment buildings and alleyway networks that made up the residential district.

"This is your mind?" Gaara asked, craning his neck to look up at the towering apartments with some awe. "It's… big."

"Is it?" I mused, crossing my arms and looking up with him. "I think this is about normal."

Gaara didn't argue the point, but he didn't look all that convinced either. I lead him down a nearby side street, cutting a trail through the low-end apartments that salary workers and career genin called home. I showed off a few of my favorite getaway routes from back when pranks took up most of my life, pointing out twists and turns in alleys that looked like dead ends, twists and turns that were dead ends, and all sorts of hiding places within a sub-par Academy student's reach.

It finally clicked for him when we emerged into the high-end residential zone where old shinobi families staked their claim. Or, more like it clicked for him when the apartment towers fell away and freed up our view of the horizon.

Gaara stopped dead in his tracks the moment he saw it, eyes flickering from face to face. The Hokage Mountain stood stark and proud, stone visages looming protectively over their village. Even in death. Especially in death.

"This is..."

I ruffled his hair, smiling up at my predecessors. "Welcome to Konoha."

Gaara hesitated, eyes flickering from the mountain to me. "I don't think this is how it works."

I considered that. "Are you a Yamanaka, Gaara?"

"I am not."

"Do you know anything about brains?"

"I do not."

"Me neither. I've got a friend who does, though, and I'm pretty sure she would have told me if my brain was busted." I ruffled his hair again, noting that it was kind of fun when you weren't on the receiving end, and set off for the fancy clan housings. When Gaara didn't immediately follow, I added: "It's probably a jinchuriki thing!"

"You said this was your subconscious made reality," Gaara said some time later, crouched and twirling a blade of grass between his fingers. I paused in coaxing one of the Nara deer from their compound and considered the words.

"Something like that, yeah."

"What does that mean? The forests, the animals, the village itself- what does it all represent? I... I don't know much about what sanity should look like, but isn't this too much? Even the grass has its place." He plucked the blade of green from the earth, studying it pensively. "When I asked you to bring me here, I was expecting something... less."

So that's what it was. I shook my head, patting the skittish doe's neck and shooing her back into the compound.

"You were expecting something more like your own mind," I said quietly, taking a seat next to him in the grass. There was a faint, syrupy smell in the air; a product of the trees the Nara kept in their compound. It was a drowsy sort of smell. I'd fallen asleep to it more than once.

"When I sleep, mother and I switch," Gaara murmured. "I see inside myself. My mind's not like this. It's not like this at all."

"What's it like?" I asked, laying back. There were clouds in the sky, fluffy and white. Perfect for watching.

"There is no sun, no moon, no stars. There are no forests or mountains, no buildings. It's dark and there's no place for me to go. The air is stale and there are no walls but I can't _move._" He hunched in on himself a little more with every word. His body grew ragged at the edges, less substantial. "It's always the same. Sometimes the voices are different, but it's all the same. I feel what mother feels. I hear... I hear-"

"Gaara."

"Every time she kills someone it all gets smaller." He raised a shaky hand to the scar he'd carved into his own skin however many years ago. It was weeping blood. "I start to suffocate. When she takes one life too many, it crushes me. I stop breathing."

"Gaara."

He stared dully at the blade of grass between his fingers. "I wake up."

I grabbed a fistful of cloth and yanked.

"Oof!" My best friend hit the ground beside me, dazed. "Why-?"

"Look at the clouds, Gaara," I told him. He did.

"... What about them?"

"Keep looking."

A minute passed. "What am I looking for?"

"I'll let you know."

We watched the clouds.

I couldn't tell you for how long. Outside my mind I could take cues from nature and the skies to keep track of time, but this sun didn't move. The clouds drifted, but there were always more to take their place. Eventually, the exhaustion my mind still hadn't quite shaken made itself felt. I dozed off to syrup smell and the distant trill of birdsong- one arm propped under my head, the other thrown over my eyes.

Whenever it was that I woke up, it was to the sight of Gaara staring up at the clouds, entranced. I watched him from the corner of my eye, and in turn he watched the skies. He breathed easily, without the labor of Shukaku's voice or his own trauma to constrict the motion. He didn't blink until I moved, stretching out and yawning- and even then it was a delayed thing.

"Why this is so soothing?" he asked, sounding like he didn't particularly need an answer. "They aren't even real clouds."

"I never got it either," I admitted. "It's just one of those things that always helps. Like, y'know, smiling when you're feeling down. Or eating ramen."

"Is that why you took me here first?"

"Nah." The sound of soft steps through long grass alerted me to the arrival of another guest, and the shock of a cold nose nuzzling my cheek identified them. The little doe laid herself down on the grass behind us, curling around my head with her legs tucked under her slight frame. I reached up, idly scratching her neck.

"I used to have a friend that stared at the clouds every day," I said, watching the blankets of white drift on by, endlessly, without a beginning or an end. "He was the self-proclaimed laziest shinobi in our generation. Whenever he had a free second he'd lay himself down and look straight up until someone made him stop. He'd be dozing in some field while the rest of us were eating lunch or playing ninja between classes. Never made sense to me.

"Well, one day I fucked up. I fucked up real bad, and someone I cared about suffered because of it. I felt like the worst sort of guy- worse than trash, even. I was supposed to be strong. I was supposed to be the _strongest_, but when it really mattered I just lost it. It was suffocating." Gaara pursed his lips, cogs turning in his head. "The people closest to me tried to cheer me up. Told me it wasn't my fault, some things couldn't be stopped, the whole deal. I didn't want to hear any of it, though, so I ran away."

"You _ran?_"

"Yep. Ran as hard as I could, as far as I could without leaving the village. I ran to the most isolated place that I could think of- the loneliest, nowhere niche in Konoha. I started blowing things up when I got there. Guess I thought if I ran out of chakra I'd be too tired to mope." I snorted, and the little doe licked my nose. "Somehow, he found me.

"I'd like to say he was looking for me, but he was honestly just out for a place to unwind. When he stepped into the clearing I'd made during my meltdown, he took one look at me, pointed at the ground, and told me to join him or get the hell out of his spot." Gaara's lips twitched, and I raised my hands up. "I couldn't say no to that. I wouldn't have wanted to get on his bad side, even if he wasn't a friend- he's got this thing he does with shadows that's a lot scarier than it has any right to be in a fight.

"So we watched the clouds, and you know what? All that negativity, all that pain and frustration, it just sort of disappeared. I ended up falling asleep, and when I woke up there was a blanket I didn't own thrown over me." Memories of time spent in the grassy districts of Konoha prickled at the edges of my subconscious, manifesting themselves as more clouds above.

"I got to thinking maybe he wasn't just a slacker," I said, running a thumb along the doe's snout. She huffed and shook off some blood that trickled down my fingers to her nose. "This guy, he was smart like you wouldn't believe. Maybe the smartest guy I've ever known. As time passed and things got worse and worse, I started to wonder if he'd seen it all coming. There's only one thing history is good for, and that's repeating itself. Maybe he put the pieces together as a kid. Maybe he saw what we'd all be going through, knew what it would do to us, and realized there was nothing he could do to stop it."

I let my hand drop, considering the clouds and the memories behind them. "Maybe he spent so long watching the clouds because it was too much for him. Could be that he didn't care about nothing, y'know? Could be that he cared too much about everything."

"What was his name?" Gaara asked. I hummed, considering.

"You know, I can't remember."

I shrugged off the look he gave me, propping myself up on my elbows. I patted the dainty doe and gestured at the compound around us. "That's not really the point. The point is, this is him."

"This is…?" Gaara sat up, casting around for a clue as to what I meant.

"You wanted to know why my mind is like this, didn't you? This is it. This is why." The doe stood, rising on slender legs, and trotted back into the forests of the Nara compound after one last affectionate bump of the nose. "Our minds are a reflection of who we are, and who we are is a reflection of the people that are precious to us."

I watched it click, savoring the enlightenment that bloomed in his eyes. The clarity of his body sharpened even further, becoming something hypersensitive to my mind's touch. I stood, and he stood with me.

"I understand," he said confidently. I grinned.

From the Nara compound, we ran over to the Akimichi district and toured the restaurants laid out for the biggest bones in Konoha to peruse at their leisure, in their leisure. When one shop in particular caught my eye, I dragged him off the road and sat him down at a grill while I rummaged around in the back.

"I had a friend that lived around here who'd eat just about anything if you put it in front of him," I explained, emerging with a stack of fresh beef that I laid out on the grill. "Not that he had bad taste- he just wasn't very picky, you know? Couldn't afford to be. He had these techniques that burned fat in exchange for chakra, so he was always putting something away to keep himself topped up for a fight."

I sprinkled some assorted seasonings on the beef and flipped it after a good sizzle. "Before I got to know him I figured he was just a glutton. I…" The crackling of burning fat filled the silence between us when I trailed off. I rubbed my neck, sheepish. "Well, to tell you the truth, I judged a lot of my friends pretty harshly before I got to know them."

"Is it not a good thing to trust your judgement?" Gaara asked quietly. I waved a hand in a so-so motion, pressing the beef flat against the bars of the grill.

"The thing about judging other people negatively is that you're almost always going to be wrong, and even if you're right you won't be happy about it." I leaned back on my stool, sighing. "You know what it's like to be judged, Gaara. We both do. People make mistakes sometimes, or they have bad habits, or _whatever_. That doesn't mean they have nothing to offer. There's always more beneath the surface."

"Always?" Gaara asked. I nodded, fixing him a portion. "Then what's beneath this?"

I froze, a slab of meat caught halfway between the grill and his plate. A drop of blood fell into my eye and I looked away, scrubbing at it with a tattered orange sleeve. "We'll get there," I assured him. "Gotta ease into these things, y'know?"

Gaara mulled over that while we ate, the beef tender and bursting with flavor. When we were done he clasped his hands in polite thanks, contemplating his dish.

"This still doesn't make sense."

"What doesn't?" I asked lightly, collecting the plates and carrying them back to the kitchen.

He frowned. "We just ate a piece of your subconscious."

I laughed. "How'd it taste?"

Next up was the Yamanaka clan's modest complex, less an official compound and more a smattering of homes mixed in with civilian lodgings- and at their center, the family's flower shop. The door to the place opened with a musical tinkle of bells. I ushered Gaara in, the smell of nature's chemicals and perfumes a near violent contrast to the scents we'd left behind at the barbecue. I gave him the grandest tour I could manage, parading down the aisles and explaining things as I went.

"These flowers are purple, but we call them blue gems because I guess the guy who named them was color blind," I lectured, tapping a row of potted flower with purple petals. I pointed to another row beyond them, white flowers with windmill petals. "These ones are oleanders, and the only thing I know about them is they look kind of like shuriken. Those light purple ones that are kind of wilting are common mallows, but they don't grow naturally in fire country so they're pretty uncommon. Those prickly ones are scorpion weeds. You're not supposed to give them to a girl, but I don't know why. I think they're pretty cool."

"You had a friend that worked here, then?" Gaara asked, cupping the petals of the desert flowers with some familiarity. "Were they a civilian?"

"Nah, she was a shinobi. Her family took turns running this place whenever they weren't on missions," I explained, leaning against a shelf stacked with fertilizers.

"To what end?"

"They had these yin techniques that let them mess around with other people's minds. Not quite genjutsu, but somewhere in the same neighborhood. Her dad did a lot of interrogation work- nasty stuff, I won't go into it. They weren't always invasive, though." I plucked a bright orange flower from its pot and held it out. "They did a lot of work as therapists, mostly for other shinobi. They used these flowers to ease their patients into things while they worked. Aromatherapy, I think it was."

"I see," he said, smelling it. "It… smells like a flower."

"It grows on you." I twirled the stem in my fingers, heading for the door. "Come on, the puppies are next."

We swung by the Inuzuka kennel and played around with the ninken there that were still too young to speak or use chakra. They spent most of their time wrestling around with themselves, but I managed to work Gaara into it. Seeing him freeze up when one of the little mutts broke off from the group and hopped into his lap made the whole thing worth it. That done, we wandered through the high class residential area, our path set for the market district beyond-

"What about that one?"

I stopped in my tracks, following Gaara's pointing finger to a set of ornate metal gates, beyond which a pristine garden and an absolutely massive series of interconnected buildings sat. Ahh. That one.

"That's the Hyuuga Compound," I said after a moment. "I had some friends who lived there, yeah."

"Can I see it?" Gaara asked, already stepping forward.

"The gates are locked, actually."

"They're… what?"

"Locked. No outsiders in. The Hyuuga are pretty stuffy, as shinobi families go." I shrugged and kept on walking. "Just how it is."

"Even in your own mind?"

"They're _really _stuffy. They'd probably find a way to arrest me for trespassing even if it was all in my head." I tapped beside my eye, shooting Gaara a mock stern look. "There's no escaping their eyes."

"Naruto…" He inhaled, setting his feet and bracing himself. What, did he think I was going to- "You're stalling."

I stumbled to a stop, and the skies rumbled with distant thunder as I cursed up an internal storm. I turned around smiling. "You wanted to get to know me better, right?"

Gaara shook his head. Firm. "I asked to see your monster. When you told me about it, I was… _happy_. Happy to know I wasn't alone. That you shared the same burden, had overcome it, and still wanted to be my friend-" His tone turned sour, disgusted. "Even though I broke beneath the same weight.

"I wanted to return that support, but you aren't letting me." He crossed his arms, and I caught a glimpse of the man he would become. The unwavering man that Suna would claim as their most beloved Kazekage. "I've changed my mind. I think we're similar after all."

"Yeah?" I asked, smile falling away.

"I think you're stalling because you don't want to show me something. And I think the something you don't want to show is what I see every time I fall asleep. I think our minds are similar after all, yours is just-" He paused, reaching for the word- "More."

He sighed, closing his eyes and focusing. Then, piece by piece, he began to unravel from my mind. Withdrawing of his own free will. "You could have said no."

I lashed out, catching him by the sash he wore across his chest and yanking him back into my mind. His eyes flew open, and I glared into them with determination.

"You might be right, Gaara," I said. "No, you _are _right. But don't you _dare_ think I'll go back on my word just because I'm a little scared. I'm Uzumaki Naruto, you hear? If I say I'm doing something, it's sure as hell getting done."

The Kazekage glared right back. "Then show me."

I did.

"It's down there?" he asked, crouching beside a sewer grate in the middle of Konoha's market district.

"He likes to sulk in the sewers, yeah." My lips twisted at the sour taste the words left in my mouth, and I shook my head. "Well, no, he doesn't really have a choice." We delved into Konoha's underground, and from there it was a straight shot to the place I'd been avoiding since we arrived.

Kurama's cage was as dark and forbidding as the last time I'd come to it, the sewer water burning faintly around our ankles as we approached. The shadows beyond the bars were all-encompassing, and made the slip of white paper that covered the true seal stand out even more. There was a tension here; a tension that I'd done my best to ignore during my last visit. The strength I'd drawn from these depths in the final hours of my life was gone, and the distance between strangers, between a prisoner and his warden, was back.

I hated it. I hated it so much that I wanted to scream.

But Gaara was here, so instead I clapped a hand on his shoulder and called out to the darkness.

"We've got company, Kurama! Come introduce yourself!"

Silence. It dragged on for several long moments. A minute. More. Gaara grew restless as the atmosphere of the place pressed in on him, fidgeting under my hand. His eyes flickered from point to point in the manmade cavern that my bijuu called home, straining to see beyond the bars and failing. Finally, he opened his mouth to speak.

And Kurama struck. Rude as always.

"Heads up!" I yanked my fellow jinchuriki behind me a split second before a titanic appendage bristling with blood red fur came whipping between a gap in the bars. Nature wrapped herself around me and The Fool reached up through the water-

I tightened my grip on Gaara's shoulder and leapt back, a thunder crack of shattering wood filling the cavern as Kurama's tail smashed The Fool's hand to pieces. I winced, my own hand spasming in sympathetic pain.

"Forgot how much stronger you are than Shukaku," I muttered. I glanced down at Gaara. "You okay?"

He swallowed, eyes fixated on the ruin Kurama had made of my colossus. He nodded once.

**I will not dance to your tune,** Kurama spoke from the depths, a throaty growl that could be felt vibrating in the air. **Entertain your playthings yourself.**

My eyes narrowed. "His name is Gaara. He's my friend."

**Empty words. He is an investment. One of a thousand pawns to be stacked in your favor for the future.** Another tail whipped out from between the bars, slamming against the walls of the sewer. **He is as precious to you as he can make himself useful. No more.**

"That's wrong. You _know_ that's wrong."

**I know nothing. I hear, see, feel nothing. For as long as I refuse your "friendship" **- he snarled the word, his scorn boiling the sewer's water - **I am _nothing_.**

"Gaara," I said quietly, as the shadows parted around the old sage's final creation. "Meet the king of monsters."

Kurama loomed above us, a behemoth of chakra stripped from a titan's remains and molded by a god's eyes. He sat behind the bars, one quasi-hand resting on a quasi-knee, his lips pulled back from his fangs. Something caught between a fox and a human being. Created with the dying chakra of a natural creature - _the _natural creature - but in a man's image. The Rikudo Sennin's touch could be seen in every feature of him, from the clawed fingers to the sharply canted eyes, and the ears the flared out from them. The light of the sewers tinted his fur red, and his wrath made the edges of it sizzle and burn. He looked like a living flame.

He looked like a demon.

"This-" Gaara breathed, the color literally draining out of him. "I have to fight this?"

"No."

Kurama slammed all nine of his tails against the bars at once, but this time I was prepared. The remains of The Fool's hand shivered and pressed itself against the surface of the water, along with another hand that rose beside it. The wooden colossus dragged itself up from the depths and accepted the brunt of the whiplash.

"You don't have to fight them. If you stand against Shukaku, meet his hatred with a kind hand, you'll get through to him eventually- I know you will." I locked eyes with Kurama. "But even if it comes to that, you won't be fighting this one. He's my fight."

He always has been.

**You are a fool.** His eyes narrowed to burning red slits. **But worse than that, you are a hypocritical fool. For all your talk of compassion, you are no better than those that came before you. You preach the value of friendship as you tighten the chains around me-** His other arm jerked, the one still in the shadows, and the groan of straining wood filled the cavern.

His arm forced its way into the light. It was covered in vines.

**You think yourself better than Hashirama. Better than Madara.** His arm jerked, the vines tightening and yanking it back into the depths. **You are _worse_.**

A thousand refusals strained against the back of my teeth. The Fool's eyes glowed yellow, tinted orange by the sewer light, more and more branches rising up from the sewer floor to reinforce his frame. With my parents' seal holding the worst of Kurama's strength back, I could subdue him. Maybe even fight him.

"You think this is what I want?" I asked, gnashing my teeth. "You think I like having these bars between us? I don't! I can't stand it- no, I hate it!"

**Then tear them down.** Kurama gripped the bars with his unshackled hand, vicious desperation stoking the flames of him. **Do what your ancestors refused to and _break this seal!_**

"I can't do that, Kurama!" I seethed. "You _know _I can't! You're too angry, you'd hurt too many people if I let you out!"

**Liar!** He lashed out with another tail, and this time The Fool caught it with both hands. Wood splintered and broke, but together they held. **I am too _valuable _for you to let out. You need my chakra for your perfect future, so you lock me away until your friendship is the only option left to me. Madara's methods with Hashirama's means. You haven't learned a _thing_.**

It hit me like a bijuudama. "You've been listening to me."

**I am always listening to you. There is nothing else to hear.**

"Then you know," I said, a pathetic sort of hope bubbling up in my chest. I hadn't wanted to tell him about my future, hadn't wanted to tell any of my friends, because I knew it wouldn't be fair to dump such heavy expectations on them. That it would taint anything new. Anything real.

But if he already knew, then maybe it was okay. Maybe-

**I know,** Kurama said, his contempt crawling along my skin. **And it means nothing.**

I stepped forward, frustration clawing up my throat. "_Nothing?_ How can it mean nothing!? It means everything!" Kurama shook his head and turned, the shadows consuming him in an instant. "Wait! Wait!"

**We are not friends.**

I called out to him, roared his name, ranted and raved at the darkness while The Fool pounded the bars. I walked straight up to the gates and dared him to crush me, dared him to do anything so long as he'd come out and talk to me.

It was Gaara that stopped me from going straight through the bars, gripping my arm with white-knuckled fingers. His lips were pressed thin, expression wild with fear, but he stood in front of the cage with me anyway. The effect Shukaku's eldest sibling had had on him was clear, and yet he stood outside The Fool's reach with resolution. I grit my teeth.

Too close. They were all too close. Gaara, Kurama, and the rest of my friends beyond. Every second I spent with them only made it worse- the knowledge that no matter what I did, I'd never have them back.

Kurama didn't come out again, no matter how long we stayed.

He had nothing left to say to me.

* * *

>There was something intoxicating in the dissonance between two opposite forces. The heaven and the earth, the sun and the moon, the yin and the yang. Perfect asymmetry. I'd been introduced to the concept in passing as an academy student, picked it up from a pair of civilian girls gossiping about some couple or another and filed it away for future disuse. Opposites attract- that's how they'd put it.<p>I'd taken to calling it the gap.<p>

"Enjoying yourself?" Naruto asked, all grimace. I hummed and dragged my kunai along the ridge of his collarbone, parting the skin with careful force.

"Immensely."

I hadn't noticed the gap until the first time I saw Naruto on a battlefield, and by then it was already too late for me. After that first point of dissonance, it became impossible for me not to notice it all. Naruto and I, we were _all _dissonance, right down to the smallest of details. My slender, whipcord build and his firm, unyielding frame. My features, painted with a nighttime palate, and his drawn from the sun and skies. The way I lit up like a flame when I was fighting to my fullest, and the way he grew cold and excruciatingly focused when there were lives on the line.

The two of us were different in every single way, and we fit. We were oil and water, forest and flame, but oh, it worked. We lived in different worlds and that was fine. More than fine. My world was my own, but there were times I didn't want to live in it. When it became too much I had Naruto. When I was drowning in Uchiha Sasuke, I could break for air in Uzumaki Naruto and inhale the gap.

Hardly more than two years of pseudo-courtship, pseudo-rivalry and I'd been hooked. I hadn't realized how much I'd come to rely on that escape until I was cut off from it. No warning, no unforgivable offense on my part, nothing. All it took was Haruno fucking Sakura to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, and I didn't see Naruto again for a year.

A _year_. Even now, sprawled out on his bed with his arms slung around my hips, it made me seethe to think of what she'd taken from me. And for what? So she could feel better about her place in his life? So she could pretend that for once she wasn't the third wheel, the piece we didn't need to fit, had never needed to fit-

"That's my jugular," Naruto hissed, pressing his head back into the mattress, away from my blade. I blinked.

"Ah, I missed a stroke." I leaned down to study the errant line in his throat, flicking my sharingan to life when my hair threw shadows across it. I consulted my memory of the design, tracing the wound with a finger. "Heal this, from here to here." He muttered something unkind, but unwound an arm from my waist and pressed two fingers to the wound nonetheless. I watched nature's ink unravel to frame his eyes and traced its chakra as it flowed into Naruto and was deftly guided to the tips of his fingers.

He held them there for a moment. When he pulled away there was whole skin beneath.

"So why are you cutting me up?" he asked, settling his hand on the small of my back. My lips twitched against a smile.

"You'll see."

The cursed seal of heaven looked odd on Naruto. Perhaps it was the fact that I was carving it into his skin rather than applying it with ink, or perhaps the difference in build was to blame, but it looked out of place. The eerie contrast of black ink on white skin had turned me into something otherworldly when I'd borne the mark, a spirit consumed by inkwrath. On Naruto, the clash of crimson with tawny skin made him look beastial. Combined with the marks on his cheeks and the over-sharp canines that peeked from his lips when he spoke, he looked like a monster fresh from a folk tale.

It wasn't actually a working seal, of course. Orochimaru had never taught me the specifics of the cursed seal, and I had never wanted to learn. The cuts I was making were shallow things, too, and with Naruto being what he was they were closing themselves up almost as fast as I was making them. In all honesty, I'd just wanted to see what the curse would look like on him. That and, well, being together like this wasn't so bad in and of itself-

Something cool and wet pressed itself against my forehead. I froze, looking slowly up from my work. Naruto, in turn, twirled the brush in his hand and made another mark on my forehead, eyes narrowed in concentration.

"... What are you doing?"

"You'll see."

Hn.

"I've been thinking," I murmured some time later, as the ink and blood flowed and the sun dipped out of the sky. "About the nature of transmigration."

_**"Is that so?"**_ A slim, noble hand laid itself across the back of my neck, announcing my ancestral hanger-on's presence.

"What about it?" Naruto asked, distracted. He flicked his brush under my right eye, leaving behind a lash of cool ink.

"Many things. The mechanics of it, what we brought back, the implications-" I made a sharp curve in my design and Naruto winced, shifting around on the bed. "Why they haven't done this before."

The brush froze on my cheek.

"Unless," I mused. "They have."

_**"We have not."**_

"They haven't," Naruto said a beat later, resuming his brushwork.

"Why is that? What's so special about us?"

"Well, the world was sort of ending when I died," he said, shrugging. I scowled and gouged into his cheek. "Ow! What the hell, bastard!?"

"Don't say it again," I snapped. "You're here, you're breathing, you're feeling pain," I pressed the kunai deeper into his cheek and he bared his teeth at me. I leaned down and mashed my lips against his, forcing my tongue past those over-sharp canines. When I pulled back we were both breathless. "You didn't die. You're _alive_."

"Fine, I get it," he relented, an odd tone in his voice. "The world was ending when Madara beat seven layers of the Shinigami's stomach out of me. Better?" I hummed, extracting my kunai from his cheek and watching him mend it.

"Why wait until the last possible moment, though? Why not before? If they've always been capable of this, why us?" I surveyed my work, speaking lowly. "Why not themselves?"

"Maybe… they couldn't do it for themselves."  
><em><strong><br>"We could have."**_

Naruto frowned, eyes focusing on some empty spot on the ceiling as he listened to his own ancestral parasite. "Then why didn't you?"

_**"There was no point,"**_ Indra whispered.

"Haaa." Naruto tossed the brush back onto his nightstand and stretched out, the muscles of his torso unwinding pleasantly with the motion. These prepubescent bodies of ours were a far cry from what we'd left behind, but they were still ours- it was still Naruto that I was straddling. That was enough. "Guess that answers that. We were in the right place in the right generation."

I rolled my eyes, drawing a thin line of blood beneath his eye. It was coming together, slowly but surely. If I was lucky the scars might even last through the night.

"It's not just that," I spoke after a long stretch of silence. Naruto's eyes were shut, but a squeeze of my thigh signalled he was at least partially aware. "You noticed it too, didn't you? While you were fighting the Ichibi, and then while I was fighting the Tsuchikage's granddaughter. We cheated."

"Cheated?"

"These eyes," I said, twisting the tomoe of my sharingan into six-pointed stars. The world around me slowed to a crawl and sharpened to a razor's edge of clarity. Streaks of color stained Naruto beneath me, countless predictions of what his next move would be- exactly how high his chest would rise, when it would fall. When he would crack an eye open to look at mine. "The mangekyou sharingan isn't something you can achieve through common stress. The threat of tragedy isn't enough, and neither is petty loss. There's only one path to these eyes."

"I know."

"I didn't lose anyone in that fight." Certainly not you.

"You came close, though." He reached up, grasping my kunai by its flat edges and tugging it from my grip. He tossed it aside, and then his arms were back around my waist. He pulled me down chest to chest. "I've been thinking about some things, too. Mostly what that old sage said right before he sent us off."

"Go now," I echoed. "Resume your journey."

"Yep. The way I see it, no one had to die to get those eyes because you already had them. It was the same for me when I fought Gaara. All I needed was that one little push, the possibility of- ah, you know." I did. "It felt like nature had been with me the whole time, and she was just waiting for the right moment to make herself known. I think that moment is all we needed. The pieces were all there- we just needed to pick them up."

"Hnnn."

We stayed like that, wrapped up in each other's arms in his quiet little apartment, and watched the day go by. With no team responsibilities to see to and nowhere suitably private to tear into each other, we'd settled for lazing the day away until night fell. I'd wanted to object, but seeing the exhaustion creeping along the edges of him had convinced me.

The future wasn't going to change itself, but neither was this moron if he kept refusing to sleep.

"Naruto," I said, fighting the grasp of my own fatigue. He muttered some nonsense sounds. "You're getting blood on me."

"You cut me."

I considered that.

"So?"

"Fuck off, Sacchin."

I blinked. "_Excuse me?_"

His lips twitched into a smirk. "Suits you, eh?"

"Am I interrupting anything?" Kakashi asked, his appearance in the bedroom window as sudden as it was unwelcome.

"You are," I informed him, straining for the kunai Naruto had tossed onto the floor.

"Just-" Naruto grunted, struggling to hold me down. "What's up, sensei?"

"May I come in?"

"No," I snapped, reaching for the maiming weapon.

Naruto waved him in.

"You know, before the debacle in River Country, I was beginning to wonder if you'd been evicted," Kakashi said, swinging over a potted cactus and touching down silently in front of the bed. He glanced pointedly around at the state of the room, strewn with several weeks worth of dirty clothes and empty containers of food- most of them ramen. Absently, he scooped the kunai up out of my reach, winking when I glared murder at him. "You don't spend much time here, do you?"

"I don't have time to sleep," Naruto said, as if there weren't bags under his eyes almost as dark as the littlest jinchuriki's. "And there's nothing else to do here, so."

"I'd say you two have more time than most," Kakashi said lightly. Giving the room one last once-over, he shrugged and pulled two slips of paper from his flak jacket, dropping them on the bed and heading for the door. "Read these and tell me what you think. I'll go make some tea."

"I don't have any tea," Naruto called.

The veteran jounin waved a hand. "I'll figure something out."

I pulled free of Naruto's bearhug and picked up the forms, committing their contents to memory in a snapshot of the sharingan's photographic storage. I read it aloud.

"Notice of Nomination. Konohagakure-hosted Chunin Exams." Naruto jerked up, snapping back to wakefulness in an instant. He snatched the spare form out of my hands and read through it, his sudden energy growing with every word.

"We get to be in the chunin exams?" he finally asked, disbelieving.

"Apparently."

"That's-!" He stopped short, caught between giddiness and his own bleeding heart. "That's not fair to everyone else, is it?"

"Not in the slightest," Kakashi called from the kitchen. "Good for business, though!"

"Why are you excited about this in the first place?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "They're exams for _genin_."

"I know that! It's just." Naruto looked away, drumming his fingers on the bed. "It's one of those things we never got a chance to try the first time around. It could be fun, right?"

"Naruto. You were the _Hokage_. You can't be promoted higher than that."

"I wasn't," he said, scowling. "You know I wasn't. Don't even joke about that."

"You sat at the desk and intimidated the foreign dignitaries. You wore the hat and robes and handed out missions when you weren't out on the field yourself." I tilted my head. "What do you call the person who leads Konoha?"

"Not me." His expression grew dangerous. This was a touchy subject for him, and I knew why, but I was done skirting around it. It didn't matter anymore, so he might as well get around to accepting it.

"Who, then?" I pressed. "If I took to the streets and asked a random citizen of Konoha who their Hokage was, what would they say?"

"Get away from me, you monster."

Fair.

"If I wasn't Uchiha Sasuke, what would they say?"

"They'd say Danzo!" Naruto snapped, driving a clenched fist into his mattress and straining the bed frame beneath. A very touchy subject. "And even then, they'd tell you he was only taking care of things until granny woke up!"

"Until she woke up," I repeated. He glared at me, daring me to give voice to what we were both thinking. Senju Tsunade had been in a coma for three full years before we transmigrated. Not even the end of the world had snapped her from it- she was never waking up. I opened my mouth to say it, because if nothing else he had to see how ridiculous he was being. Tsunade was alive and well, and more than likely hammered in some sleazy gambling town in Nowhere, Fire Country. He might as well acknowledge the sacrifice she'd made.

Kakashi, of course, chose that moment to come strolling in with tea.

"I'm sure you both know what this entails," he said, as if he hadn't heard everything. He passed me a ceramic cup with a dog's paw carved into it, steaming and yet cool to the touch. "Three tasks to determine your value as chunin that I can't tell you anything about, very hush hush. I can't imagine you'll have any trouble, though. You'll go in, pick on some children half a decade younger than yourselves, and civilians the world over will sing your praises. Won't you feel big!"

"... Where did you get these cups?" Naruto asked.

Kakashi quirked an eye. "So, what do you say?"

It wasn't like I'd say no. There was always a chance I'd be matched against Naruto in the finals. Or Sakura. I wasn't sure which would be more satisfying. "Fine."

"I'll do it," Naruto agreed. "Did you give Sakura her form yet?"

Kakashi hummed his confirmation, nursing the third ceramic cup he'd kept to himself. "I let her know when and where she'll be expected to show up- that's three days from now at the Academy building, eight o'clock sharp."

"She was okay with it, then?" Naruto asked.

"As okay as a rookie genin can be," he said, swirling his tea around. "You two will keep an eye out for her, won't you?"

I snorted.

"Of course we will, sensei," Naruto said, shooting me a sharp look. "We're teammates."

"Precious teammates," I agreed.

"Hmm." The weight of Kakashi's chakra fell upon me, not-quite-killing intent boxing me in from all sides. The stars in my eyes whirled, and Indra's slender hand tightened on the back of my neck. Naruto tensed, flexing his fingers towards a cross-

The moment broke, and Kakashi was climbing out the windowsill.

"I'll leave her in your care, then," he said. He glanced over his shoulder, cocking an eyebrow. "By the way, what are those marks?"

"Orochimaru gave them to me," I said, leaning back against my lover. He wrapped me up, a show of solidarity despite it all. "They gave me strength."

"I see," Kakashi mused. "Well, I like the duality." That said, he disappeared from Naruto's room as quickly as he'd entered, two cups of tea and some paper the only signs he'd been there at all.

"Duality?" I repeated. Naruto completed that cross, summoning a kage bunshin. The clone disappeared into his apartment's bathroom and returned a moment later with a hand mirror. It tossed the little circle of glass to Naruto, who in turn held it up in front of my face.

Ink. Ink on my cheeks, thick lashes of color that undercut my eyes. Ink on my forehead, a circle right in the middle and a dot of color within. Ink that wound around my eyelids. His ink. The ink of his sage mode, to match the mark of my cursed seal.

My reflection smiled.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: <strong>Merry Chrismasu.


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